Development of optical trajectography device for the lagangian study of turbulent flow inside a stirred tank used in pharmaceutical industry

Stirred tanks are devices that are widely used in various process steps of the pharmaceutical
industry. The performance of these processes (animal cell culture, crystallization, flocculation …) strongly depend on the physico-chemical and hydrodynamic environment present locally in these tanks. To fully describe this local environment, an Eulerian - Lagrangian approach must be adopted in order to establish history of conditions met by a particle as a cell, a crystal or a floc. This approach implies to determine the trajectory followed by the particle. To this aim, the Chemical Laboratory of Liege University has developed a prototype of optical trajectography device. The objective of this paper is to present the device, developments that were necessary for its use and the results obtained. The device is composed of two cameras modeled by a pinhole model which record the position of a bead that has a size equal to 490 µm and that perfectly follows local flow structures. The measured trajectory has been validated by comparing average time velocity fields deduced from it to those measured, in the same operating conditions, by particle image velocimetry (P.I.V.).