A Study on the Hydrodynamic Behavior of a Slot-Rectangular Spouted Bed using CFD
Date
2013-09-25
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Abstract
Spouted beds are widely used as gas-solid contactors in various physical and chemical processes. In order to improve the design of spouted beds for efficient gas-solid contact, a better understanding of the complex flow field of granular solids is required. The recognition of flow regimes is also very important in the application of spouted beds.
In this thesis, numerical modeling using FLUENT 6.3 commercial software was utilized to study the flow in a slot-rectangular spouted bed. Two-phase gas-solid flows in the bed were simulated with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique using the two-phase Eulerian-Eulerian granular model. Two-dimensional computer simulations were performed to investigate the effects of physical parameters on the hydrodynamic behavior of slot-rectangular spouted beds. The fountain height and pressure drop were evaluated for various superficial gas velocities, bed heights, and solid particle sizes. The numerical results of the fountain height were in good agreement with the experimental data reported elsewhere.
The numerical simulations were applied to predict different flow regimes and construct flow regime maps. The constructed flow regime map for a bed containing solid particles with a diameter of 1.44 mm was in good agreement with an experimental map previously reported elsewhere. With this successful numerical mapping, a flow regime map for particles with a diameter of 3.77 mm was constructed for various superficial gas velocities and static bed heights. The map was composed of six distinct flow patterns, i.e., fixed bed, internal jet, jet-in-fluidized-bed, spouting, incoherent spouting, and slugging. The slugging flow regime occurred at large values for the static bed height and air inlet velocity, while the spouting regime arose by increasing the air inlet velocity at low values of static bed height. Unlike the spouting regime, large pressure drop fluctuations were observed in the incoherent spouting regime.
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Chemical
Citation
Tabatabaei, S. A. (2013). A Study on the Hydrodynamic Behavior of a Slot-Rectangular Spouted Bed using CFD (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25049