The Past, Present, and Future of Commercial-Scale Fluidized Bed Modeling

For the last 30 years, engineers have been modeling fluidized beds using computational fluid dynamics. It has been an interesting journey with a strong relationship between fundamental research and applied development. Challenges defining solids pressure and viscosity to subgrid models for allowing drag models describe mesoscale effects. Today, CFD models have become a required tool with the scale-up of fluidized bed and circulating fluidized bed operations. Still, there are our challenges. Particle properties and changes in particle properties is needed to better understand attrition, catalytic deactivation, redox, and poisoning. Fast reactions, typical of fluidized bed and circulating fluidized bed operations, also need to be better captured. Such reactions are driven by micro-mixing, which is not complete capture with the broad gridding of a CFD model for a commercial unit.