Comparison of Different Passive Oil-Water Mixing Schemes in a Flow Loop

A. Chaudhuri[1]
[1]Materials Synthesis & Integrated Devices, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA
Published in 2014

Oil and water are immiscible fluids and they tend to separate very easily when introduced into a flow stream from two different sources in a flow loop. This model studies the development of mixture volume fraction in an oil-water-flow loop with 3 different passive mixing schemes: (i) blind-T, (ii) check valve, and (iii) static mixer. Each device produces different levels of mixture homogeneity and are compared by calculating the variation in volume fraction along a cross-section. The results of this study show that (i) simply injecting two immiscible fluids into a single pipeline does not result in a homogeneous mixture and there can be huge variations in local properties, and (ii) passive mixing schemes improves homogeneity but their effectiveness varies.