Fast simulation of industrial-scale bubbling fluidized beds using mesoscience-based structural model

Abstract

Fast and accurate simulation of industrial-scale reactors is the first and critical step towards virtual process engineering. In this article, we show for the first time that a recently proposed mesoscience-based structural model, which treats the bubble phase and the emulsion phase as the two interpenetrating continua, is able to achieve fast and accurate simulation of the hydrodynamics of four industrial-scale bubbling fluidized beds, in terms of macroscopic distribution of parameters such as the bed expansion rate, the axial and radial profiles of solid concentration and velocity. On the other hand, due to the fact that the mesoscale bubbling structures have been averaged over during the model derivation and the mesh sizes used are comparative to or larger than the bubble diameter, it is impossible to correctly capture the evolution, coalescence and breakup of bubbles. Therefore, the mesoscience-based structural model is best used as a computational fluid dynamics based method for fast engineering simulations of gas-solid fluidization.