Fluidized bed
This is part of my PhD work, funded by Department of Energy through a grant.
Fluidized bed has many advantages as gas-solid reactors or powder handling processors because of its advantages of high heat and mass transfer, temperature homogeneity, and mixing property.
The primary challenge in simulating full-scale fluidized beds stems from significant scale differences: the apparatus spans meters, whereas the particles are mere millimeters or even smaller.
As it’s not feasible to simulate the system by tracking each particle individually, the aim of this project is to model the particle phase as a continuous fluid. This is achieved by employing the Kinetic Theory of Granular Flow in the framework of Two Fluid Model (TFM).
The emergence of a bubble within a fluidized bed. On the left: Computational Fluid Dynamics-Discrete Element Method (CFD-DEM) simulation (5 hours to complete). On the right: Two Fluid Model (TFM) simulation utilizing the Kinetic Theory of Granular Flow (completed in 10 minutes).