How can chaos benefit Australian manufacture?

[摘要] Mixing and thermal management of materials are essential manufacturing steps in the food, chemical, mineral, pharmaceutical, bio and plastics processing industries.Global mixing equipment sales alone exceed $1 billion annually, and market share by the leading manufacturers, none of which are Australian, is maintained by utilizing many years of experience with equipment designs that change only incrementally.Yet mixing and heat transfer consume enormous amounts of energy: in just the two manufacturing sectors of foods and chemicals, mixing and heat transfer consume 14% of the sectors' total energy input, approximately 14 billion kWh annually in Australia.The innovation we describe reduces energy use by 80-96% for mixing and 60-80% for heat exchange while producing better or the same results as conventional equipment.We accomplished these sustainable cost and efficiency benefits by designing flows from first principals to generate chaos.Our device is called the "Rotated Arc Mixer"(RAM) for mixing and heat transfer.The RAM is also simpler and lower cost to manufacture due to the absence of internal elements producing large flow resistances.In 2010 RAM technology won the 10xE (10 times Efficiency) Chemical Engineering/Entrepreneurship Challenge sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Rocky Mountain Institute.This competition sought radically energy efficient designs of processes, devices and materials and honored the "elegant frugality" of the RAM.A Victorian manufacturer is commercializing the RAM, which is currently in operation in Australian food processing.

[发布日期] 2011-10-29 [发布机构] CSIRO

[学科分类] 地球科学(综合)