Mixing and segregation in a bidisperse gas-solid fluidised bed: a numerical and experimental study

In many industrial applications of dense gas-solid fluidised beds, mixing and segregation phenomena play a very important role. The extent of mixing and segregation is strongly influenced by the bubble characteristics. Therefore, the extent of mixing and segregation, induced by a single bubble injected in a monodisperse and bidisperse fluidised bed at incipient fluidisation conditions and in freely bubbling fluidised beds has been studied both with well-defined experiments and with a 3D Euler-Lagrangian model. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) was successfully applied to obtain the ensemble averaged particle velocity profile in the vicinity of the bubble in dense gas-solid fluidised systems. The bubble size of a single injected bubble in a fluidised bed at minimum fluidisation conditions calculated with a 3D discrete particle model (DPM) depended strongly on the selected gas-particle drag model. The widely used Ergun equation combined with the Wen and Yu [Powder Technol. 98 (1998) 38; Chem. Eng. Sci. 47 (1992) 1913] relations overpredicted the bubble size due to an overprediction of the drag force. The DPM with the drag model proposed by Koch and Hill [Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech. 33 (2001) 619], based on Lattice-Boltzmann simulations, gave much better agreement with the experimental findings. The segregation rates in a bidisperse freely bubbling fluidised bed predicted by the DPM agreed very well with the experimentally measured segregation rates by Goldschmidt [M.J.V Goldschmidt, Hydrodynamic modelling of fluidised bed spray granulation, PhD thesis, Twente University, 2001]. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.