The right tool for the right job! How many times have you heard this? Scotty said it to Kirk. It’s a common phrase but, are you guilty of ignoring it? On a recent plant visit, a customer showed one of our sales reps a tank where a 2800 gallon batch of 2% carbopol was made. The customer said that they start by adding the water, they turn on the agitator, and they add all of the carbopol. They let it run for 48 hours and, they transfer the product to the points of use, and they only have to filter out a small amount of fisheyes. Uh, really? And this is considered acceptable?
We like to ask customers 2 questions – how are you doing it now and, why change? Sometimes, we don’t have to ask. In this case, the answers are obvious. They’re using the wrong tool for the job and it’s taking 2 full days to complete the job. A low shear mixer is adequate for some jobs but, when a process requires both flow and shear, the low shear mixer won’t get the job done. You can let it run for hours, days and, in some cases, forever, and you’ll still have fisheyes. It’s like you’re using a hammer to drive in a screw. It’s simply the wrong tool.
Check out the short video below showing a side-by-side comparison of low shear mixing and high shear mixing with a Rotosolver. If a picture is worth a thousand words then, this video is worth a million words. On the surface, it looks like the low shear mixer is pumping a lot of product around the tank but, you’re not seeing what’s happening below the surface. The powder is beginning to hydrate before it gets disbursed. The immediate result is the formation of those fisheyes that everyone hates. Even on this small scale, the flow driven, low shear mixer ran 12 times longer than the Rotosolver and it still didn’t get the job done. It can’t get the job done because it’s the wrong tool for the job.
Every plant has a bottleneck somewhere. If you have a step in your process where you mix powders into liquids, this is likely to be your bottleneck. The solution is simple, really. You need shear and flow. The shear insures that the powders do not agglomerate and form fisheyes. The flow insures that everything passes through the shear zone. Years ago, this was accomplished by using two mixers in one tank – one to provide shear and the other to provide flow. Today, there’s one mixer that provides both shear and flow – the Rotosolver.
We invite you to call your local Admix Rep and ask about handling your toughest powder-into-liquid applications. Chances are, we’ve done it before. If our vast application database doesn’t include your specific application or, if you’d simply like to see the Rotosolver in action, our local rep has a demo unit capable of making a small batch.
