Assessment of scale-up designs for a diameter-transformed fluidized bed reactor with MP-PIC simulation

Abstract

Scale-up has always been the bottleneck to the development of new industrial processes. This study aims to assess the scale-up effects of a diameter-transformed fluidized bed (DTFB) reactor through three-dimensional, multi-phase particle-in-cell (MP-PIC) simulation with the Energy-Minimization Multi-Scale (EMMS) drag and solid stress model. Four 3.5 Mt/a DTFB reactors are designed by scaling up a 1.2 Mt/a one with different scale-up schemes and simulated after validation. It is found the Glicksman’s rule shows the most similarity in solid concentration distribution to the benchmark case while the FixedOperation rule under-predicts the solid concentration, meaning that only keeping constant Ug and Gs cannot guarantee the same distribution of solid concentration when scaling up the fast fluidized bed. In addition, all four scale-up designs ensure the same gas velocity, yet they exhibit varying solid velocities throughout the scale-up process. A more rational scale-up rule is required for the elaborate reactor scale-up.