Accelerating Green Transition Through Improved Mixing Solutions

Currently, process industries are keen on accelerating the green transition by focusing on one or more of the following areas: a) resource-efficient operations, b) value-added products from side streams, and c) new products with superior functionality. A more promising approach to achieving these goals is to develop novel and scalable processing solutions. In many new manufacturing technologies, mixing stands out as one of the preferred unit operations. It plays a crucial role in various processes, including fermentation, foam-forming, high-consistency processing, enzyme-assisted fibrillation, catalyst reactions, pigment dispersion, and ore leaching. In these operations, a detailed understanding of how processing equipment influences the phases (gas, solid, and liquid) is essential for achieving superior product functionality and improving process efficiency. However, the current knowledge on the phase-phase and/or phase-equipment interaction is limited to the conventional manufacturing methods. A thorough research using experimental and computational techniques on the new material properties and its interaction with the equipment is needed to develop novel processing solutions. Furthermore, the full potential of the novel solutions are not realized in manufacturing sectors due to huge gap in trasitioning the research findings from lab to industrial scale. To address these challenges, the AIMS (Accelerating green transition through Improved Mixing) project aims to demonstrate scalable mixing solutions at different Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) for selected applications.