Mixing

The unit operation in which two or more materials are interspersed in space with one another is one of the oldest and yet one of the least understood unit operations in process engineering. In agriculture and food processing, mixing operations are often used to blend ingredients. Particularly, mixing is used in the food industry with the main objective of reducing non-uniformities and gradients in properties such as concentration, color, texture, or taste between different parts of a system (Uhl and Gray, 1986). The degree of uniformity required may vary somewhat, but most of the time it is important to provide a nutritionally balanced and palatable feed mixture.