(653a) Numerical Simulation and Experimental Study of a Micro Circulating Fluidized Bed

Numerical simulation and experimental study
of a micro circulating fluidized bed

Yupeng Xu^a,*, Jordan Musser^a,
Tingwen Li^a,b, Balaji
Gopalan^a,c, Rupen Panday^a,d, Jonathan Tucker^a,e,
Greggory Breault^a,d, William A. Rogers^a

a. National Energy
Technology Laboratory, Morgantown, WV 26505, USA

b. AECOM,
Morgantown, WV 26505, USA

c. West Virginia
University Research Corporation, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA

d. REM Engineering
Services, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA

e. West Virginia
University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA

Abstract

Circulating
fluidized beds (CFB) are widely employed in industry for a wide variety of gas-solid
contacting operations. Over the past few decades, CFB hydrodynamics have been
studied using various experimental techniques and by numerical simulations. Recently,
several efforts have modeled full-loop CFBs using the two-fluid model (TFM)
whereby gas and solids are treated as interpenetrating continua. However, this technique
only resolves solid motion at the computational cell level. With the
advancement of high-performance computing, higher fidelity models, like
Computational Fluid Dynamics-Discrete Element Method (CFD-DEM) which tracks the
trajectory of individual particles, have become increasingly popular as
research tools. This is because particle-scale information including residence
time, collision forces, and dispersion intensities are readily available for
detailed analysis of complex flow phenomena.

In this
first of its kind work, a small scale, full-loop circulating fluidized bed is
investigated using physical experiments and CFD-DEM simulations conducted with
the U.S. Department of Energy’s Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchanges code,
MFIX-DEM. Experimental and simulation results are compared using pressure drops
data, solids circulation rate and solids standpipe inventory height. Additionally,
the performance of different drag laws is examined.

Fig.1. Direct comparison between simulation
and experiments