Experimental and Computational study of the Bed Dynamics of Semi - Cylindrical Gas - Solid Fluidized Bed

Abstract

With computational fluid dynamics (CFD) it is possible to get a detailed view of the flow behavior of the fluidized beds. A profound and fundamental understanding of bed dynamics such as bed pressure drop, bed expansion ratio, bed fluctuation ratio and minimum fluidization velocity of homogeneous binary mixtures has been made in a semi-cylindrical fluidized column for gas solid systems, resulting in a predictive model for fluidized beds. In the present work attempt has been made to study the effect of different system parameters (viz. size and density of the bed materials and initial static bed height) on the bed dynamics. The correlations for the bed expansion and bed fluctuations have been developed on the basis of dimensional analysis using these system parameters. Computational study has also been carried out using a commercial CFD package Fluent (Fluent Inc.). A multifluid Eulerian model incorporating the kinetic theory for solid particles was applied in order to simulate the gas–solid flow. CFD simulated bed pressure drop has been compared with the experimental bed pressure drops under different conditions for which the results show good agreements.