CFD-DEM Numerical Simulation and Experimental Validation of Heat Transfer and Two-Component Flow in Fluidized Bed

Based on the improved computational fluid dynamics and discrete element method (CFD-DEM), heat transfer and two-component flow of biomass and quartz sand have been studied from experiments and numerical simulation in this paper. During experiments, the particle temperature and moving images are respectively recorded by infrared thermal imager and high speed camera. With the increase of the velocity, the mixing index (MI) and the cooling rate of the particles are rising. Due to larger heat capacity and mass, the temperature of biomass drops slower than that of quartz sand. Fictitious element method is employed to solve the incompatibility of the traditional CFD-DEM where the cylindrical biomass are considered as an aggregation of numerous fictitious sphere particles arranged in certain sequence. By the comparison of data collected by infrared thermal imager and the simulated results, it can be concluded that experimental data is basically agreement with numerical simulation results. Directly affected by inflow air (25 degrees C), the average temperature of particles in the bed height area (h < 30 mm) is about 3 degrees lower than that of the other heights. When the superficial gas velocity is larger, the fluidization is good, and the gas temperature distribution is more uniform in the whole area. On the contrary, bubbles are not easy to produce and the fluidization is restricted at lower superficial gas velocity. Gas-solid heat transfer mainly exists under the bed height of 10 mm, and decreases rapidly on fluidized bed height. The mixing index (MI) is employed to quantitatively discuss the mixing effectiveness, which first rises accelerate, then rising speed decreases, finally tends to a upper limit.