Three-Dimensional Numerical Simulation of Semi-Cylindrical and Cylindrical Spouted Bed Hydrodynamics

Abstract

Understanding of detailed transport phenomena occurring in spouted beds is necessary and fundamental for increasing the range of industrial applications. Especially for drying processes, detailed information about hydrodynamics is important, because it is closely related to heat and mass transfer. The use of semi-cylindrical spouted beds is a classical technique that emerged as an alternative to obtaining experimental data on the fluid dynamics of full-column spouted beds. This technique has been questioned, because the geometry of the bed must be altered for the visualization of the hydrodynamics occurring inside it, which, nevertheless, is the only way to obtain visual information on solid dynamics behavior inside the column. Therefore, the objective of this study was to revisit the semi-cylindrical spouted bed technique using computational fluid dynamics to perform numerical simulations and verifying these results against experimental results obtained in cylindrical and semi-cylindrical beds. Both simulated and experimental results were compared for the fluid dynamics of each system. The simulated results indicated that the flat wall had a great influence on the solid velocity, which is in accordance with the experimental observations already presented in the literature. However, little influence of this wall on static pressure, porosity profiles, and spout channel shape was observed in the simulated results, indicating a high fluid dynamic similarity between cylindrical and semi-cylindrical systems.