Experimental study on bubble behavior and CFD simulation of large-scale slurry bubble column reactor

Abstract

Slurry bubble column reactors (SBCR) is a three-phase fluidized reactor with outstanding advantages compared with other reactors and is difficult to scale-up due to lack of information on hydrodynamics and mass transfer over a wide range of operating conditions of commercial interest. In this paper, an experiment was conducted to investigate the bubble behavior in SBCR with a height of 5600 mm and an interior diameter of 480 mm. Bubble rise velocity, bubble diameter, and gas holdup in different radial and axial positions are measured in SBCR using four-channel conductivity probe. Tap water, air, and glass beads (mean diameter 75–150 μm) are used as liquid, gas, and solid phases, respectively. It shows that hydrodynamic parameters have good regularity in SBCR. Moreover, a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package, Fluent, was used to simulate the process in SBCR. The simulations were carried out using axi-symmetric 2-D grids. Data obtained from experiment and CFD simulation are compared, and results show that the tendency of simulation is almost uniform with the experiment, which can help to obtain further understanding about multiphase flow process and establish a model about the synthesis of alcohol ether fuel in SBCR.

Key words： SBCR; four-channel conductivity probe; hydrodynamics; CFD

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 program, Grant No. 2005CB221205).

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