Patent ID: 8028944

Claim:
An impeller for evenly dispersingly mixing solid particles within a liquid vehicle, comprising; an imperforate circular polymer disk, having a circular inner portion and an annular outer portion that are of differing flexibility, including oppositely directed circular faces, the disk being mountable on a rotatable shaft, each oppositely directed face having a plurality of radially extending grooves therein, each groove being formed about a centerline that is a radius of the disk, edges of each groove being parallel with the disk centerline, the surface of each groove between the groove edges being the shape of the curved portion of a right cylinder, each groove communicating with the circular periphery of the disk and having length in the radial direction no greater than one-quarter the diameter of the disk, grooves on one face of the disk being circumferentially offset with respct to grooves on the other face so that a groove on one face is circumferentially spaced between the two adjacent grooves on the remaining face; and a plurality of cubically configured pegs extending perpendicularly outwardly, parallel with the axis of rotation of the shaft, from each oppositely directed circular face of the disk, the pegs being positioned on a circle that if drawn would be radially inboard of the grooves but outboard of juncture of the circular and annular portions of the disk, each peg being angularly equidistant from and located at a position that would be between adjacent grooves if the grooves extended radially inwardly to the circle, pegs on a respective face of the disk being angularly offset from pegs on the remaining face, the pegs being in a diamond-like orientation relative to a radius of the circle such that a radius, if drawn, would pass through the two vertices defining juncture of two different lateral surfaces of the cubically configured peg.