Comparison between two-fluid model simulations and particle image analysis & velocimetry (PIV) results for a two-dimensional gas-solid fluidized bed Articles uri icon

publication date

  • September 2011

start page

  • 3753

end page

  • 3772

issue

  • 17

volume

  • 66

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0009-2509

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1873-4405

abstract

  • This work compares simulation and experimental results of the hydrodynamics of a two-dimensional, bubbling air-fluidized bed. The simulation in this study has been conducted using an Eulerian-Eulerian two-fluid approach based on two different and well-known closure models for the gas-particle interaction: the drag models due to Gidaspow and Syamlal & O'Brien. The experimental results have been obtained by means of Digital Image Analysis (DIA) and Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) techniques applied on a real bubbling fluidized bed of 0.005. m thickness to ensure its two-dimensional behaviour. Several results have been obtained in this work from both simulation and experiments and mutually compared. The resulting comparison shows and acceptable resemblance between simulation and experiments for dense-phase probability, and good agreement for bubble diameter and velocity in two-dimensional beds. Regarding the time-averaged velocity of the dense-phase, the present study clearly reveals that simulation and experiments only agree qualitatively in the two-dimensional bed tested, the vertical component of the simulated dense-phase velocity being nearly an order of magnitude larger than the one obtained from the PIV experiments. This discrepancy increases with the height above the distributor of the two-dimensional bed, and it is even larger for the horizontal component of the time-averaged dense-phase velocity. In other words, the results presented in this work indicate that the fine agreement commonly encountered between simulated and real beds on bubble hydrodynamics is not a sufficient condition to ensure that the dense-phase velocity obtained with two-fluid models is similar to that from experimental measurements on two-dimensional beds.

subjects

  • Industrial Engineering
  • Physics

keywords

  • multiphase flow; fluidisation; computation; bubble; particle velocity; piv