Helical ribbon impellers are widely used in chemical and process industries for the mixing of pseudoplastic fluids of high viscosity. The design of such impellers is based on an assumed linear relation between shear rate and the rotation speed of the impeller. A number of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of the flow field have been carried to verify this hypothesis. It is shown that while the shear rate varies greatly within the mixing vessel, there does exist a linear relationship between the impeller speed and the local shear rate near the tip of the impeller. The proportionality constant K, associated with this linear relation is found to be dependent on the geometric parameters Of the system, but is largely independent of the flow behavior index. Based on these results, a new correlation, applicable to both Newtonian and power-law fluids for power consumption, is proposed.