CFD Simulation of Bed Voidage Behaviour of a Liquid-Solid

Abstract

A two dimensional transient model has been developed to simulate the hydrodynamic behaviour of the liquid–solid fluidized bed using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. Eulerian Granular Multiphase model has been used in the present study and simulations have been carried out using the commercial CFD package Fluent 6.2.16. To validate the results of CFD simulation, experiments have been conducted in a 0.1m ID, 1.24m height vertical Plexiglas column. Water and glass beads have been used as the liquid and solid phase respectively. The simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental values. Bed voidage values in the expanded fluidized bed obtained from CFD simulation has been compared with the ones predicted from the equation available in literature.