INDUSTRIAL MIXING OF PARTICULATE SOLIDS: PRESENT PRACTICES AND FUTURE EVOLUTION

Powder mixing is a part of our everyday life, but is the source of major industrial preoccupations. Mixing is widely used in many industries but until now design of mixing technology and mixing equipment belongs sooner to engineering art than to scientifically based calculation. Each branch of industry develops its own experience in the field mostly based on time and labour consuming expe-rimental research, and very often the obtained results cannot be used directly in another branch, i.e., the problem of mixing simulation and calculation is far from universality. This is why it is very im-portant to separate from particular sectorial problems the general intersectorial problems of theory and practice of mixing and concentrate the attention of researchers and engineers on them solution to build the general basis for scientifically based design of mixing technology and equipment. Current problems are associated with the definition of the homogeneity of the mixtures, the ways of measuring it, the sampling errors and techniques, the segregability of the mixtures in the powder handling operations, mixer choice, as well as mixer conception. In this paper, we review such aspects and try to draw some perspectives from a combined industrial experience – chemical engineering approach: the development of on-line monitoring techniques to assess homogeneity and further con-trol the process; the improvement of mixer’s scale up procedures, as well as the optimisation of mixer design and operation; the development of new mixing technologies, multifunctional, nearly “universal”, with a special emphasis on continuous processes; the completion of the actual standards on powder homogeneity by introducing structural information.