Weakly coupled analysis of a blade in multiphase mixing vessel

Two or more physical systems frequently interact with each other, where the independent solution of one system is impossible without a simultaneous solution of the others. An obvious coupled system is that of a dynamic fluid-structure interaction. 8] In this paper a computational analysis of the fluid-structure interaction in a mixing vessel is presented. In mixing vessels the fluid can have a significant influence on the deformation of blades during mixing, depending on speed of mixing blades and fluid viscosity. For this purpose a computational weakly coupled analysis has been performed to determine the multiphase fluid influences on the mixing vessel structure. The multiphase fluid field in the mixing vessel was first analyzed with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code CFX. The results in the form of pressure were then applied to the blade model, which was the analysed with the structural code MSC.visualNastran forWindows, which is based on the finite element method (FEM). (© 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)