(290f) Democratizing CFD: Expanding the Use of Fluidization Modeling to Address Today's Greatest Challenges

In tackling urgent sustainability challenges, the fluidized bed has emerged as a key technology, leveraging its proven effectiveness in diverse applications over the past 100 years. However, transitioning from lab-scale proof-of-concept to commercial-scale implementation is an expensive and lengthy process. Given the pressing nature of climate change-related processes, expediting the commercialization of these new concepts becomes all the more critical. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an increasingly important tool used in fluidized bed technology development for reducing risks in scale-up and accelerating development. Unfortunately, the use of CFD, particularly in fluidization, remains largely confined to CFD practitioners and domain experts. This talk aims to explore the existing barriers preventing widespread use of CFD as a tool by all chemical engineers involved in technology design, scale-up, and optimization and what is being and needs to be done to circumvent these barriers.