Effect of elevated temperature and silica sand particle size on minimum fluidization velocity in an atmospheric bubbling fluidized bed

The impact of temperature and particle size on minimum fluidizing velocity was studied and analyzed in a small pilot scale of bubbling fluidized bed reactor. This study was devoted to providing some data about fluidization to the literature under high temperature conditions. The experiments were carried out to evaluate the minimum fluidizing velocity over a vast range of temperature levels from 20 degrees C to 850 degrees C using silica sand with a particle size of 300-425 mu m. 425-500 mu m, 500-600 mu m, and 600-710 mu m. Furthermore, the variation in the minimum fluidized voidage was determined experimentally at the same conditions. The experimental data revealed that the U-mf directly varied with particle size and inversely with temperature, while epsilon(mf) increases slightly with temperature based on the measurements of height at incipient fluidization. However, for all particle sizes used in this test, temperatures above 700 degrees C has a marginal effect on U-mf. The results were compared with many empirical equations, and it was found that the experimental result is still in an acceptable range of empirical equations used. In which, our findings are not well predicted by the widely accepted correlations reported in the literature. Therefore, a new predicted equation has been developed that also accounts for the affecting of mean particle size in addition to other parameters. A good mean relative deviation of 5.473% between the experimental data and the predicted values was estimated from the correlation of the effective dimensionless group. Furthermore, the experimental work revealed that the minimum fluidizing velocity was not affected by the height of the bed even at high temperature. (C) 2020 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.