Investigation of Gas-Solid Fluidized Bed Dynamics with Spherical and Non-Spherical Particles

Abstract

The hydrodynamic behavior of a gas-solid fluidized bed operating with both spherical and non-spherical particles is presented in this paper. For this purpose a plexiglass tube with an outside diameter of 3.8cm and a wall thickness of 0.318cm was used as the fluidized bed. With air as the carrier gas spherical borosilicate glass beads with a diameter of 1mm were used as the spherical particles and borosilicate glass with mean particle size of 717 �� m were used as non-spherical particles. Methodology of the particle size distribution and sphericity analysis is presented in this paper. Pressure measurements and high-speed imaging were utilized to characterize flows in a 5cm static packed bed. Mapping of bed pressure drop and superficial gas velocity across the bed was done and showed much lower pressure drop occurring for the non-spherical particle. The minimum fluidization and terminal velocity conditions for the specified fluidized bed and particles is also presented in this paper. MatPIV analysis of high-speed images, captured with a high-speed camera shows the flowfield velocity vectors and vorticity for both spherical and non-spherical particles.