Characterization of an aerated stirred tank. Analysis of Bubble Size Distribution, Gas hold-up and power consumption

Gas-liquid stirred vessels are considered important when it comes to production of biogas, drugs and vaccines, to name a few. The operative conditions, hydrodynamics of the system, gas distribution in the stirred vessel and power consumption are parameters crucial in order to predict the behaviour and the performance of the process. In addition to that, the study of the fluid dynamics parameters and their effect on the system are important when it comes to scaleup to production scale, in which the behaviour of small systems can be replicated and applied to scale-up processes, leading to better planning and better design for industrial processes. Therefore, the study of flow regimes in a laboratory scale stirred vessel, gas dispersion, bubble size distribution and power consumption in the system are aspects that must be taken into account during the design of processes in stirred vessels. The analysis takes in consideration optical methods for bubble size distribution analysis, power measurements with torque method and electrical resistance tomography analysis for gas dispersion determination. In this study, the results obtained are compared with literature correlations in order to validate the experimental results.