Industrial mixers and blenders are in the food, plastic, chemical, pharmaceutical, and other industries to mix or blend a wide array of materials into a high quality homogeneous mixture.
Various mixers are used to combine dry materials, liquids, or to combine both together, with mixers available in sizes from laboratory to larger production line scale.
Unlike traditional batch mixers, some mixers also offer continuous mixing operations. In these specialised mixers, one or more dry ingredients and one or more liquid ingredients can be accurately and consistently metered into the machine and see a continuous, homogeneous mixture come out the discharge of the machine.
If mixing dry materials alone, such as powders and granules, tumble mixers are used, where a drum rotates forcing the particles to “tumble” over one another and mix together.
Blade mixers can also used to combine dry materials, and by importing a large amount of air into the mix, the bed of particles becomes fluidised and this can reduce mixing times. Ribbon mixers can also be used for this purpose.
Liquids, both miscible and immiscible with low or high viscosity, can be combined by mixers using various agitation systems to produce tri-directional displacement of the fluids: radial, axial and tangential flow.
Mixing miscible liquids results in homogenization, where the two mutually non-soluble liquids are equally dispersed throughout. Disperser mixers can be used to create these homogenized fluids for use in the cosmetics industry, for lotions and shampoos, and food industries.
Mixing immiscible liquids results in the creation of emulsions and is typically used in the cosmetics industry for creams and mascara, the food industry and the chemical industry for the creation of inks and paints.
Liquids and solids can be evenly combined together with reactor/disperser mixers as they are equipped with various counter-rotating agitation devices. These combined mixtures have applications in dissolution, crystallization, dispersion or heat transfer operations, and are used by the specialty chemicals industry to manufacture adhesives, paints, the cosmetics industry for toothpaste and the building materials industry for waterproof coatings.
Photograph courtesy of Feeco
