Chaotic liquid shaker: Design, implementation and application

It has been argued that chaotic vibration provides the best possibility for achieving efficient and thorough mixing of fluids, by evoking complex and abundant perturbations into the original steady flows. In the last two decades, advances in the understanding of chaos theory and nonlinear-circuit technologies have led to favorable prospects to capitalize some features of chaos in liquid mixing applications. In this paper, a liquid mixing apparatus (an electromechanical shaker) based on the commonly used stirred tank model is introduced. The design and implementation of this liquid shaker, capable of working under the control of different kinds of signals, are reported. Constant-voltage signals, periodic signals and chaotic/hyperchaotic signals are applied to the impeller/tank velocity control mechanisms, exploring the efficacy of different perturbation schemes for liquid mixing. Comparable experiments are carried out to investigate the time consumption in sucrose dissolving processes and the dye dispersion homogeneity in visualizable mixing flows. The results of these experiments reveal that chaotic and hyperchaotic perturbations help enhance the liquid mixing efficiency and homogeneity quite significantly, yielding faster and more uniform results than all nonchaotic counterparts. © 2007 World Scientific Publishing Company.