Study on mixing criteria and on the effect of the stirrer geometry on the mixing of glass

The quality of glass is strongly dependent on the mixing of the glass melts. The choice of appropriate stirrers and the prediction of the mixing quality is thus of great importance in the production process in glass technology. However, there is still a lack of mathematical methods today for a fast and reliable assessment and improvement of the mixing effect of stirrers in glass melts. In this study we first look at an alternative mathematical tool for the description of the mixing process and derive characteristic quantities which, at low numerical expense, provide a measure for the quality of the glass mixing. Secondly, we perform a large number of numerical simulations of the mixing process for different stirrer geometries to obtain sufficiently many of these characteristic values. Finally, these values are used as input parameters in a neural network, which is used for the optimization of the parameters describing the geometry of the stirrer.