Improve Profits & Achieve Sustainability Goals Through Better Mixing

Jun 1, 2022
3 min read

Updated: Aug 6

Jacoby-Tarbox Product Manager Dave Purcel covered this exact topic in a session on how better tank mixing directly connects to both profitability and sustainability goals in chemical and industrial facilities. The core message: mixing isn't just a process step — it's an area where hidden costs and missed opportunities often go unnoticed.

Let Compliance Lead to Profits

Environmental compliance is often treated purely as a cost center — something facilities do to avoid penalties, not something that generates value. But effective mixing solutions can flip this framing. Properly blended and treated wastewater or produced water is more likely to meet discharge or reuse standards on the first attempt, reducing the retesting, retreatment, and potential fines that come with non-compliant batches. Compliance achieved efficiently, rather than through repeated correction, becomes a cost advantage rather than just a cost.

Storage Tanks: Money Stuck in Storage

Storage tanks holding poorly mixed or stratified product represent tied-up capital that isn't moving through the process efficiently. When contents settle, separate, or fail to blend properly, facilities often hold material longer than necessary — reprocessing, retesting, or simply waiting for natural settling to resolve issues that proper mixing would have prevented from the start. Every day product sits in a tank due to mixing-related delays is capital not being converted into throughput.

Hidden Challenges and Costs

Mixing problems often hide in plain sight. A tank that "seems fine" on the surface may have significant stratification, solids settling, or incomplete blending occurring below the surface. These hidden issues surface later as:

Off-spec batches requiring rework
Inconsistent product quality reaching downstream processes
Sediment accumulation requiring costly tank cleaning
Equipment wear from handling poorly mixed, higher-viscosity, or solids-laden material

Prevention vs. Treatment

There's a fundamental distinction between preventing a mixing problem and treating its consequences after the fact. Treatment — filtering out settled solids, reprocessing off-spec batches, or manually breaking up stratified layers — is reactive and costly. Prevention, through properly designed and positioned mixing equipment from the start, addresses the root cause rather than managing symptoms repeatedly.

What Are Eductors?

Eductors are power-free mixing devices with no moving parts. They use the momentum of a motive fluid (directed through a nozzle at velocity) to create a pressure differential that draws surrounding fluid into the flow stream, generating continuous circulation and mixing action within a tank or pipeline. Because there's no motor, impeller, or shaft exposed to the process fluid, eductors avoid the maintenance burden and failure modes associated with mechanical mixing equipment — particularly valuable in corrosive or abrasive service.

Tank Liquid Agitators (TLA) & Applications

Tank Liquid Agitators are eductors specifically designed for in-tank mixing applications. They're commonly used for:

Blending and balancing produced water in oil and gas operations
Preventing stratification in chemical storage tanks
Maintaining suspension of solids in process tanks
Homogenizing tank contents before transfer or treatment

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Analysis

Rather than guessing at mixing equipment placement and sizing, CFD analysis models fluid flow within a specific tank geometry to predict mixing patterns, identify dead zones where circulation is poor, and optimize agitator placement and orientation before installation. This engineering-driven approach reduces the risk of installing mixing equipment that underperforms due to tank-specific flow dynamics that generic sizing wouldn't catch.

Prevention as a Strategy

Taken together, these pieces point to a consistent theme: facilities that invest in properly engineered mixing solutions upfront — sized and positioned using tools like CFD analysis — tend to avoid the recurring costs of treating mixing problems after they occur. This is the connection between better mixing and both profit and sustainability: less rework, less wasted capacity, more consistent compliance, and lower long-term operating cost.