Trailing vortices around a 45° pitched-blade impeller

The trailing vortex system near impeller blades has been identified as the major flow mechanism responsible for mixing and dispersion in stirred vessels, and high turbulence levels in the vortices have an important impact on such phenomena as drop breakup and cell damage in bioreactors. Numerical computations of the flows require more detailed information on the velocity characteristics generated by different impeller designs than is available in the literature. Our study on the mean flow and turbulence structure generated by a pitched‐blade turbine with four 45° inclined blades found that single trailing vortex is formed around each turbine blade. The vortex axis spread out radially by less than 0.0015 T and was inclined at 20° to the horizontal plane. The vortices merged into the bulk flow structure at around 135° behind each blade. Periodicity of the mean flow due to the crossing of the individual blades and high levels of kinetic energy of turbulence (k) are contained within a radial distance of around r/T = 0.23 from the axis and a vertical distance of z/T = 0.07–0.46 from the bottom of the vessel. The k levels decay to nearly‐uniform and low values outside this region. The results are compared with earlier investigations, and their implications for mixing processes and CFD predictions of the flows are discussed. The data identify flow regions accurately where intense turbulence is present and thus give useful indications for the optimization of mixing processes.