Design engineers are applying high-tech tools to improve the performance of industrial mixers and blenders.
“There was a football-field sized area of half-liter shakers to emulate the motions of researchers who used to shake test tubes of those organisms to start growth,” recalls Calabrese, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Maryland in College Park. “They had to use all those shakers to produce the quantities they needed because, if they tried to do it in a 50-gallon batch, they couldn’t recreate the kind of mixing that occurred when someone shook a vial by hand.”