Simulation of Roasting Metallurgical Concentrates in Fluidized Bed Using CFD-DEM

Abstract

In this study, we utilized multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and discrete element method (DEM). Effect of the kinetic parameters of the roasting process in a fluidized bed was investigated. Our results indicate that it is possible to numerically integrate the coupled CFD-DEM system without significantly increasing computational overhead. It is also clear, however, that reactor operating conditions, reaction kinetics, and multiphase flow dynamics have major impacts on the roasting products exiting the reactor. We find that, with the same pre-exponential factors and mean activation energies, inclusion of distributed activation energies in the kinetics can shift the predicted average value of the exit gas-solidphase and its statistical distribution, compared to single-valued activation-energy kinetics. These findings imply that accurate resolution of the reaction activation energy distributions will be important for optimizing roasting processes.