Experiment and 3D simulation of slugging regime in a circulating fluidized bed

Abstract

A circulating fluidized bed (CFB) is widely applied in many industries because it has high efficiency. To develop and improve the process, an understanding of the hydrodynamics inside the CFB is very important. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) represents a powerful tool for helping to understand the phenomena involved in the process. In this study, a CFD model was developed to represent a cold model of the laboratory scale CFB which was designed to study the hydrodynamics of a CFB using commercial CFD software. The Eulerian approach with kinetic theory of granular flow was used for simulating the hydrodynamics inside the system. After proper tuning of relevant parameters, the pressure profile along the equipment from the simulation was well agreed with that from the experiment. The simulation result expresses the hydrodynamic parameters of the slug flow such as solid volume fraction, gas and solid velocities and granular temperature in the riser.