Effective lateral dispersion of momentum, heat and mass in bubbling fluidized beds

Abstract

The lateral dispersion of bed material in a bubbling fluidized bed is a key parameter in the prediction of the effective in-bed heat transfer and transport of heterogenous reactants, properties important for the successful design and scale-up of thermal and/or chemical processes. Computational fluid dynamics simulations offer means to investigate such beds in silico and derive effective parameters for reduced-order models. In this work, we use the Eulerian-Eulerian two-fluid model with the kinetic theory of granular flow to perform numerical simulations of solids mixing and heat transfer in bubbling fluidized beds. We extract the lateral solids dispersion coefficient using four different methods: by fitting the transient response of the bed to (1) an ideal heat or (2) mass transfer problem, (3) by extracting the time-averaged heat transfer behavior and (4) through a momentum transfer approach in an analogy with single-phase turbulence. The method (2) fitting against a mass transfer problem is found to produce robust results at a reasonable computational cost when assessed against experiments. Furthermore, the gas inlet boundary condition is shown to have a significant effect on the prediction, indicating a need to account for nozzle characteristics when simulating industrial cases.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

effective dispersion / heat transfer / mass transfer / mixing / gas-solid fluidized bed

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Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Swedish Energy Agency through the Swedish Centre for Biomass Gasification (SFC, project number P34721-3). The computations were enabled by resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering (C3SE) partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement No. 2018-05973.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11705-024-2503-4 and is accessible for authorized users.

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2024 The Author(s) 2024. This article is published with open access at link.springer.com and journal.hep.com.cn