Mixing Through Half a Century of Chemical Engineering

The first mixing studies on chemical reactor engineering date from approximately fifty years ago. There are several reviews on mixing that are generally focused on a specific topic, such as chaotic mixing. This chapter presents an overall picture of the evolution on mixing science and its impact on chemical reactor engineering. The works reviewed in this chapter are single-phase flows although some of the concepts presented in this chapter are also applied to multiphase reactors.

Keywords: Mixing, micromixing, macromixing, residence time distribution, micromixing test reaction, chaotic mixing, turbulent mixing, micromixing models, lamellar model, CFD.