Mixing (process engineering)

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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. Mixing at industrial scale is done in batches (dynamic mixing) or with help of static mixers.

The opposite of mixing is segregation. A classical example of segretation is the Brazil_nut_effect.