Design and Understanding of Fluidized-Bed Reactors: Application of CFD Techniques to Multiphase Flows

The industrial deployment of the fluidized bed reactors (FBR) have recently increased because of their excellent heat and mass transfer characteristics and product efficiency. In the state-of-the art design of these reactors, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a recently developed tool which can assist in their scale up. This book describes practical applications of multiphase CFD models with the kinetic theory of granular flows in bubbling, turbulent, and fluidized-bed reactors, including both experimental and computational approaches. It explains bubble behaviors, hydrodynamics, and reaction kinetics that are needed for scaling up such reactors using two multiphase CFD codes, the IIT code and the MFIX code developed at the NETL. It discusses two kinds of granular temperatures to determine solid diffusions and mixing in particle and bubble levels, and a technique to optimize catalyst size in fluidized catalytic reactors. This book is useful to research engineers working on the fluidization technology, or any researcher studying multiphase flows, computational fluid dynamics, and fluidization.