Mixing (process engineering)
From Free net encyclopedia
In industrial process engineering, mixing is a unit operation that involves manipulating a heterogeneous physical system, with the intent to make it more homogeneous. Familiar examples include pumping of the water in a swimming pool to homogenize the water temperature, and the stirring of pancake batter to eliminate lumps. This concept is captured formally in physics, where the mixing of dynamical systems is a topic studied in its own right. In mathematics, the concept of mixing is formally defined for measure-preserving dynamical systems and stochastic processes, and includes the ideas of strong mixing, weak mixing and topological mixing.
At an industrial scale, efficient mixing can be difficult to achieve. A great deal of engineering effort goes into designing and improving mixing processes.
The opposite of mixing is segregation.