White Paper: Scale Up Of High Shear Rotor-Stator Mixers

In virtually any application, scale up is a critical process that impacts your business in a multitude of ways, from proper planning of plant floor design and equipment configuration, to operating procedures, to the net operating-and capital-cost impact on the bottom line. In laboratory-scale trials, misjudging the time required to achieve mixing equilibrium by just a few seconds can ultimately cost your company millions of dollars, not to mention wasted time and effort and increased wear-and-tear on the equipment, during commercial-scale production. The laboratory tabletop HSM usually represents the first step in exploring the particular benefits of rotor/stator technology for a given application. This familiar laboratory tool is generally equipped with a variety of interchangeable attachments that allow it to operate in a variety of mixing modes — as a conventional HSM, as a propeller mixer, and as a high speed "saw tooth" disperser

Such versatility is vital in bench-scale development, because it allows the research-and-development person to quickly test many diverse processing strategies. However, as valuable as the lab scale mixer may be, it is also the source of one of the most common and costly mistakes in the scale up from laboratory-scale HSM to pilot-scale and production machines. Unless laboratory testing is conducted systematically and with great care and accuracy, subtle errors in over-processing on the bench top can produce enormous errors in scale up projections. Such errors are particularly common, because many engineers underestimate the lab-scale mixer's extraordinarily high throughput-to-product-volume ratio.

Download the complete white paper

SOURCE: Charles Ross and Son Company