Experimental evaluation and modeling of liquid jet penetration to estimate droplet size in a three-phase riser reactor

Abstract

In this work, the effects of injecting an evaporating liquid jet into solid–gas flow are experimentally investigated. A new model (SHED model) and a supplementary model (spray model) have also been proposed to investigate some flow-field characteristics in three-phase fluidized bed with the mean relative error 4.3% between model and measured results. Some experiments were conducted to study the influences of flow-field parameters such as liquid volumetric flow rate, injection velocity, jet angle and gas superficial velocity as well as solid mass flux on the jet penetration depth (JPD). In addition, independent variables were experimentally employed to propose two empirical correlations for JPD by using multiple regression method and spray cone angle (SCA) by using dimensional analysis technique. The mean relative errors between the JPD and SCA correlations versus experimental data were 7.5% and 3.9%, respectively. In addition, in order to identify the variable effect, a parametric study was carried out. Applying the proposed model can avoid direct use of expensive devices to measure JPD and to predict droplet size.