This paper deals with mixing in stirred tank reactors by paddle agitators and two-blade impellers with different blade widths. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used to solve the 3D hydrodynamics and to obtain at every point the flow patterns, the stress components and the viscous dissipation function. From the latter information, the power consumption is calculated. These results are compared with available experimental data : good agreement is observed. For example, for a paddle agitator, the flow is essentially plane far away from the horizontal walls. That means that, in order to create an axial circulation in the volume of the tank, the impeller height has to be decreased. This work documents the ability of CFD to model changes in flow patterns for three dimensional flows in stirred tanks.