Scale process effect on the power consumption characteristics of a novel curved Rushton turbine within a reactor vessel

•A scale-down effect on power consumption in unbaffled reactor vessels is presented.•The predicted power is consistent with the experimental results in the scale-down process.•The power requirement of the new curved Rushton turbine is lower than that reported in the literature.•A clearance of C=0.33T could effectively eliminate the dead zones within a reactor. In this work, a new curved Rushton turbine (CRT) is investigated in terms of the effects of the reactor size, impeller clearance, and rheological properties of the biopolymer solutions on the power consumption in unbaffled reactor vessels. The results show that the power consumption can be adequately predicted for the given scale geometries. In a logarithmic plot, the power curves of two scales agitated with different concentration solutions in the laminar regime (Reg < 9) perfectly overlap as a straight line with a –1 slope, which shows an agreement with the literature. The scale power constant Kp of the curve impeller is slightly smaller than the classical Rushton (RT) impeller in the literature. The clearances C=0.33T with the CRT could effectively eliminate the dead zones, which confirms that the new impeller agitation within an unbaffled reactor vessel could be regarded as an adept impeller for industrial applications.