Studies on Fluidization Behavior of Spouted Bed and Mathematical modeling

Abstract

Fluidization behavior of spouted bed for a gas-solid system has been studied by carrying out a number of experiments in a cylindrical Perspex column of 5cm diameter and 100cm height. Different system parameters investigated are particle size, initial static bed height, material density, spout velocity and spout diameter. Spout velocity was calculated with the available literature. Attempt has been made to develop correlations for the bed expansion/fluctuation ratio and the fluidization index of the system on the basis of dimensionless analysis approach. The behavior of the spouted bed was also tried to be analysed by DEM –modeling in which the governing equation of force balance has been descretized by finite element central difference method. The calculated values of the fluidization index and bed expansion ratio have been compared with the experimentally observed values. It was observed that the calculated values of the fluidization index and bed expansion ratio by both the methods (i.e. DEM and Dimensionless analysis) agree with the experimental values in most of the cases with little or negligible deviation implying the developed models to be of great importance in reality.