The Art of Mixing Powders into Liquids without Clumping.
The Challenge: Dissolve Powders Into Liquids Without Creating Fisheyes or Lumps
It is vital when dissolving powders into liquids to prevent lumps from forming.
Lumps of undissolved powder when mixing with liquids, is of particular concern when working with powders that are difficult to wet-out or dealing with highly viscous stabilizers. Factors like these increase the chance that a substance (such as a stabilizer) will congeal, forming a gelling surface around powder particles. This prevents the liquid from fully wetting the powder and lumps or fisheyes are created.
Why is the formation of lumps or fisheyes such an issue?
A number of reasons: Firstly, the functionality of a stabilizer is not utilized efficiently when lumping occurs –which means more powder is needed to be added the recipe to achieve the same functional results. Secondly, lumps can prevent a product from being completely formed with subsequent issues with quality control. And ultimately: customer complaints!
To prevent globules of undissolved powder from forming, we need to address a variety of mixing issues, including the dispersion of the powder, the wetting of solids, shear rates, and the breakup of agglomerates.
Critical Steps to Prevent Fisheyes and Lumps
To prevent lumping and clogging, it is important to pay attention to several aspects of the mixing and pre-mixing processes, including:
???????????Storage and handling the powder correctly and ensuring it is dry
???????????Selecting the optimum equipment with high shear forces
???????????Optimising how the powder is added to the liquid
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???????????Choosing the right mixing temperature
Proven Methods of Mixing Particularly Challenging Powders
Many powders that tend to lump, such as stabilizers, are prohibitively hard to disperse. To overcome the issue of lumping and clogging, these powders require high-shear mixing, A number of systems have been engineered for dealing with such scenarios.
Batch mixers, which incorporate a high shear mixing unit inside the mix vessel, are the ideal solution when dissolving smaller volumes of difficult powders into highly viscous liquids, Typically Batch Mixers work effectively up to 5000 litres. Correct tank geometry is important for high shear batch mixers to be effective. Additionally, by dosing powder on the liquid’s surface and transporting it quickly towards the mixing head in a controlled vortex, we can wet the powder optimally by ensuring minimum exposure to the liquid medium.
For larger volumes of powder and liquid, a high shear inline mixer provides the fastest and most consistent method of adding powders to liquid streams. This is typically via a hopper, ideally feeding directly into the high shear mix chamber. As the mixing process is virtually continuous the inline high shear mixer can be used indefinitely with minimal downtime.
Mixquip design and manufacture a comprehensive range of stainless steel mixing systems to suit every process requirement. For over 40 years, we have provided mixing solutions for companies across Australia and Asia-Pacific region, using cutting-edge mixing and processing technology.
Think Mixing – Think Mixquip
1300 649 784 | [email protected]
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