DEM investigation of mixing indices in a ribbon mixer

Mixing index is an important parameter to understand and assess the mixing state in various mixers including ribbon mixers,the typical food processing devices.Many mixing indices based on either sample variance methods or non-sample variance methods have been proposed and used in the past,however,they were not well compared in the literature to evaluate their accuracy of assessing the final mixing state.In this study,discrete element method(DEM)modelling is used to investigate and compare the accuracy of these mixing indices for mixing of uniform particles in a horizontal cylindrical ribbon mixer.The sample variance methods for mixing indices are first compared both at particle-and macro-scale levels.In addition,non-sample variance methods,namely entropy and non-sampling indices are compared against the results from the sample variance methods.The simulation results indicate that,among the indices considered in this study,Lacey index shows the most accurate results.The Lacey index is regarded to be the most suitable mixing index to evaluate the steady-state mixing state of the ribbon mixer in the real-time(or without stopping the impeller)at both the particle-and macro-scale levels.The study is useful for the selection of a proper mixing index for a specific mixture in a given mixer.

Revised regional importance measures in the presence of epistemic and aleatory uncertainties

Two revised regional importance measures(RIMs),that is,revised contribution to variance of sample mean(RCVSM)and revised contribution to variance of sample variance(RCVSV),are defined herein by using the revised means of sample mean and sample variance,which vary with the reduced range of the epistemic parameter.The RCVSM and RCVSV can be computed by the same set of samples,thus no extra computational cost is introduced with respect to the computations of CVSM and CVSV.From the plots of RCVSM and RCVSV,accurate quantitative information on variance reductions of sample mean and sample variance can be read because of reduced upper bound of the range of the epistemic parameter.For general form of quadratic polynomial output,the analytical solutions of the original and the revised RIMs are given.Numerical example is employed and results demonstrate that the analytical results are consistent and accurate.An engineering example is applied to testify the validity and rationality of the revised RIMs,which can give instructions to the engineers about how to reduce variance of sample mean and sample variance by reducing the range of epistemic parameters.