The possibilities of an accurate stirrer safety design, relating to the critical rotational speed with simple analytical calculations are often very unsatisfactional, because the fluid dynamic effects on the structure and the real, often flexible restraint systems cannot be sufficiently considered. Both aspects, however, have an important influence on the critical rotational speed, the oscillation amplitudes and stirrer bending loads and consequently its critical rotational speed regions. The mixing fluid can act both as a damping, and as an exciting element. As a result, different oscillating amplitudes occur, compared with no-load operation (air). The properties of the mixing fluid and the fluid dynamics in the mixing vessel have definitely to be part of the stirrer safety design. Upgrading the analytical approaches with additional fluiddynamic masses is often only possible for standard stirrers, mixing fluid medium water, and are not transferable to stirrers with complex stirrer head designs. In addition, cost and time-consuming pre-tests are necessary for determining the fluid dynamic masses. Commercial FEM-programms are recently not able to calculate fluid-strucuture-interaction problems at practice relevant Reynolds numbers. A fully coupled simulation of FEM and CFD-models, permanently exchanging values like forces, displacements and velocities, is very memory and CPU-time consuming and difficult to programm. In this work, a self-developed numerical model for the stirrer dynamics is implemented in a commercial CFD-Code (Fluid-Strucutre-Interaction). The computational fluid field is fully coupled with the stirrer structure, considering all fluiddynamic forces on the stirrer structure. Possible flexible restraints between stirrer and rack are analytically implemented in the numerical model. Consequently, all relevant influences on the structural dynamic response of the stirrrer can be considered for the stirrer safety design. The goal is a, by experimental data validated, pre-calculation of the critical operating range of different stirrer types in various fluid and restraints.
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The possibilities of an accurate stirrer safety design, relating to the critical rotational speed with simple analytical calculations are often very unsatisfactional, because the fluid dynamic effects on the structure and the real, often flexible restraint systems cannot be sufficiently considered. Both aspects, however, have an important influence on the critical rotational speed, the oscillation amplitudes and stirrer bending loads and consequently its critical rotational speed regions. The mi...
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