Abstract
Fluidization of non-spherical particles is a common process in energy industries and chemical engineering. Understanding the fluidization of non-spherical particles is important to guide relevant processes. There already have been numerous studies which investigate the behaviors of different non-spherical particles during fluidization, but the investigations of the fluidization of polyhedral particles do not receive much attention. In this study, the investigation of the fluidization of polyhedral particles described by the polyhedron approach is conducted with a numerical CFD-DEM method. Experiments of the fluidization of three kinds of polyhedral particles are conducted under the same condition with corresponding simulations to validate the accuracy of our CFD-DEM model. The results indicate that our CFD-DEM model with the polyhedron approach can predict the behaviors of polyhedral particles with reasonable accuracy. Fluidization behaviors of different polyhedral particles are also investigated in this study. Compared to spherical particles, the motion of polyhedral particles is stronger, and mixing degree is higher under the same fluidization gas velocity.
Highlights
For the polyhedral particles which we focus on in this study, different methods have been proposed in past research, such as the common plane method (CP) [36], the fast common plane method (FCP) [37], the shortest link method (SLM) [38], or the orientation discretization database solution [39]
The shape of the pentahedron is a triangular prism, of which the triangle faces are equilateral triangles, and the shapes of two hexahedrons are cuboids. These polyhedral particles are modeled by the polyhedron approach and the spherical particles are described by the spherical approach
Pentahedron is a triangular prism, of which the triangle faces are equilateral and the shapes of two hexahedrons are cuboids. These polyhedral particles are by the polyhedron approach and the spherical particles are described by the approach
Summary
Fluidization is widely employed in different processes in energy industries and chemical engineering, such as mixing, biomass gasification, adsorption and pharmacy [1,2,3]. For the CFD-DEM simulation of the fluidization of non-spherical particles, the calculation of the drag force is a technological problem. Different models have been submitted to calculate the drag force which consider the influence of the shape and orientation of non-spherical particles [29,30,31,32]. Besides the drag force, effective contact detection is important for simulating the motion of non-spherical particles in a fluidized bed. In existing research with the polyhedron approach, the investigations of the fluidization of polyhedral particles with the CFD-DEM method do not receive much attention. In this study, a CFD-DEM coupling method with the polyhedron approach is proposed to investigate the fluidization behaviors of polyhedral particles. The fluidization characteristics including the particle flow behaviors and particle mixing behaviors are investigated
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