Finite Element Analysis of Shear-Thinning Flow Problems in Mixing Vessels

A mixed finite element method for steady incompressible flow problems of generalized Newtonian fluids is presented. The Newton—Raphson scheme is used to treat the nonlinear terms in the resulting system of nonlinear algebraic equations and is combined with Uzawa’s algorithm to solve the linear systems at each iteration step. Applications to the numerical analysis of various mixing problems in cylindrical unbaffled vessels are discussed. Computational results of the power consumption are compared with experimental data.