Ribbon Blender with Cyclical Vessel to Get Better Mixing Homogeneity

The plastics industry produces and processes artificially materials like plastics, silicone or synthetic resins. It is part of the chemical industry and can be divided into three main fields: production of plastics, processing of plastics and plastics engineering. The plastics industry supplies innovative products and solutions for important industrial fields like automotive and engineering industry, packaging industry, electrical engineering and construction industry. So, this innovative products and solutions are indispensable in our life.

In most applications, there are many manufacturers using ribbon blender to produce their product and some mixers might equipped with cooling jacket to keep temperature of mixing material. At the beginning of 2014, one Argentina customer came to our factory in order to find a good solution for their product because their ribbon mixer can not have good mixing homogeneity and have long mixing time. The plant manager Mr. Daniel wanted to find a good mixer to replace their old ribbon blender. At first, Vortex MT engineer recommend ploughshare mixer to customer and delete the choppers on side to avoid breaking their material. But Mr. Daniel told us that their material would be very easy to get melted if mixing temperature beyond 50 degree and their material can not allowed fast mixing speed which could break the particle size. After analysis on customer’s using experience, our engineer director Mr. Wang customized design a ribbon blender for customer. Our engineer summarized following reasons:
A. The most important reason is the shape of vessel. Generally speaking, the ribbon blender is U shape vessel but customer’s material is very light density. So, if using U shape vessel, most material will be at top and there is dead space because the ribbon agitator can not access to the top and two side area is also a dead space for round ribbon agitator. Considering this problem, our engineer decided to use cyclical vessel like ploughshare mixer. This design can totally solve the problem of mixing dead space because round ribbon agitator can access to everywhere in the cyclical vessel.
B. According to their current mixer, we slightly increased the speed of shaft from 38rpm to 42rpm. Furthermore, in order to keep material’s temperature below 50 degree, we also designed a cooling jacket for ribbon mixer.

We delivered this improved ribbon blender to Argentina customer’s plant on October, 2014. After their testing, the mixing result is much better than before and Mr. Daniel was very satisfied with our mixer till now. In this case, we realize that U shape vessel is not suitable for light density material but if we change to round shape vessel, the mixing homogeneity can get much improved and shorten mixing time. Vortex MT would like to share our experience with customer if they meet the same problem.