Guide to Mixers and Blenders

As previously discussed, sanitary mixers are critical components in hygienic processing systems. On an industrial scale, efficient mixing and blending may be challenging to achieve, and so a great deal of engineering goes into designing and improving mixing processes. Indeed, the specifics of a hygienic processor’s mixing techniques may be considered as proprietary by a given manufacturer and provide a competitive advantage for their products in the marketplace.

Compared to mixers used in home applications, sanitary mixers are constructed from a relatively small number of materials that are deemed acceptable.

Due to its hygienic properties, stainless steel is the most commonly used alloy found in sanitary mixers, especially those used in the food & beverage processing and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries.

For similar reasons of hygiene, mixers used in the hygienic processing industries must also be easy to clean, and a self-draining design is critical for this purpose.

Sanitary industrial mixers are also more highly versatile and sophisticated pieces of equipment when compared to the standard mixers you use in your home. Many of these mixers may be highly automated and programmed to control the mixing speed, time, and ingredients introduced. Some types of sanitary mixers also provide the operator with the option of slowly adding multiple ingredients simultaneously.

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As mentioned in the introduction, there is a wide range of sanitary mixers and blenders available on the market, employing an equally wide range of mixing technologies. To organize this guide, we will consider two broad categories of mixers and blenders:

• Batch mixers (which are in-tank type mixers)
• Continuous mixers (which are in-line mixers incorporated into a process line).

Within each of these categories, there are two different types of mixers to be considered as well.

• Low-shear mixers are commonly used for maintaining product homogeneity, mixing, dissolving, solids suspension, heat transmission, and fermentation applications.
• High-shear mixers are used for particle size reduction, dispersion, gas injection, homogenization, and emulsification. We will discuss each of these types of sanitary mixers in the following sections