(103e) Validation of New Scale-up Methodology for Gas-Solid Fluidized Bed Reactor Using Advanced Measurement Techniques*

This study focuses on validating the new mechanistic scale-up methodology for hydrodynamics similarity of gas-solid fluidized bed reactors that has been developed in our laboratory. It is based on maintaining similar or closer time averaged radial profiles of gas holdups in two different gas-solid fluidized beds to achieve local and global similarity of the dimensionless hydrodynamic parameters. This is because the gas dynamic dictates the hydrodynamics of these beds. The new scale-up methodology has been successfully validated by assessing for the first time the local hydrodynamic parameters, such as time averaged cross-sectional distributions and radial profiles of gas and solids holdups at different axial levels measured by gamma ray computed tomography (CT) technique and particles velocity field and turbulent parameters (shear stress, normal stresses, and turbulent kinetic energy) measured by radioactive particle tracking (RPT) technique. The experimental results showed that achieving similarity in the radial profiles of the gas holdup in the geometrically similar beds is essential for ensuring closer or similar local and global hydrodynamics similarity. As the differences increase in terms of magnitude and trend in the gas holdup radial profiles between two beds, the differences increase in the detailed hydrodynamics.