A METHOD FOR MIXING VISCOUS MATTER BY GENERATING SHAPED ACOUSTIC CONVECTION IPC6: F15 D 1100 B01 F 11/00 F15 D 1110 F15 D 1112 The invented method belongs to the field of acoustic hydrodynamics. It is a method to apply acoustic streaming to treat the viscous body. The method described here is invented to mix efficiently some high-viscous matter such as the warm and the could heavy fuel oil or heavy fuel oil and some other heavy oil product as well as to foster heating such a matter for enabling it to flow. For example, such a need occurs to move high-viscous matter. It is useful to apply this mode in order to treat high-viscous matter hard to mix in some conventional way.

The inventors elaborated a technology to mix high-viscous matter based on the invented method. Applying this technology improves essentially mixing the hot matter with the cold one thus facilitating to achieve the matter to be more fluent (to succeed in flowing).

Hence crude oil and oil products do not considerably lead the heat then but convection alias respective movement of the matter's parts provides some heat exchange for such a matter. The Russian engineers N. Kalaschnikov and V. Chernikin have described such a mode to heat high-viscous crude oil or an oil product in their instructive volume N.

Kalaschnikov, V. Chernikin. Mixing viscous oil products by vibration (in Russian). Moscow 1961. The authors suggest conventional mixing of high-viscous oil products is too difficult because the matter to be treated applies the great hydrodynamic friction to the acting body which tries to move the matter. Joggling the high-viscous matter causes it to stream acoustically and therefore convects the matter to ease heating it to the full extent. The method invented shapes the acoustic streaming in such a way that it mixes the parts of the matter differing by their temperatures thus achieving the whole matter to be warm enough for fluency.

The invented acoustic convection method complements essentially complemented the technology to unload high-viscous oil products such as heavy fuel oil, especially its heating in the container in the circulating mode. A technology elaborated on the invented method orders to convect the matter to the full extent of the container when one is subjecting the matter to heating in the circulating method.

Conventional circulating mode throws the hot jets from the appropriate nozzles standing in the middle of the tank to the surface of the cold matter the tank contains. The hot matter so added makes warm only the surface layer of the residing matter but does not forethrow deeper into the cold matter. Thus the conventional circulating mode does not provide enough mixing the hot matter with the cold one to the full extent of the tank. The heat does not extend to the pieces of matter far from the nozzle so those parts maintain the high viscosity which avoids unloading them. Most difficult is heating the matter closest to the ends of tank, where so-called tight lumps have developed. The unloadableness thus remains under 85% due to these lumps. The residuing part of the matter decreases the useful volume of the tank so forcing to carry the tight residue with the tanks which increases the mass of the tank car and the expense of energy. The aim of the present invention is to remove this lack.

The invented method shapes an acoustic field id est a field of joggling with the values of its parameters appropriate to the case of the shape of the body (viscous matter) to be treated and its other properties. Such shaped joggling field causes the acoustic streaming just in those pieces of the matter what hardly could move in some conventional way due to the high hydrodynamic resistance. In order to subject the matter to such acoustic field the invented method envises to put an appropriate joggling body able to generate a field of joggling needed to cause the desired acoustic streaming. Also it is possible to modify the acoustic field by displacing the joggling body in order to take the sufficient extent of matter into acoustic streaming.

Within the framework of the present mode different technologies are possible to elaborate based onto differing frequency intervals, resonances, shapes of acoustic streams and methods to modify the place, the attitude and the shape of the acoustic field during the treatment. Some of such modes of technology allow to apply known equipment while some other have requested for inventing appropriate equipment such as the flagellic equipment to mix viscous matter invented by Mati Kokk, Jevgeni Rjazin and Kalle Köömnemägi to apply the shaped acoustic convection method for mixing viscous matter (application P97 00012 10.02.97 to the Patent Office of Estonia). The flagellic equipment is constructed to control the movement of the joggling body in an appropriate way.

The inventors consider the acoustic convection to be the most intense when the joggling body placed into the matter resonates to an appropriate piece of the matter to be treated.