A Pressure-Drop Method for Real-Time Monitoring the Solid Flux in Circulating Gas-Solid Process

A pressure-drop method for real-time monitoring the solid flux in
circulating gas-solid processes

Sihong Gao, Yiping Fan*, Chunxi Lu

State
Key Laboratory of Heavy Oil Processing, College of Chemical Engineering, China
University of Petroleum, Beijing, 102249, China

*Corresponding author.

E-mail
address: fanyipin@yahoo.com (Y. Fan)

Solid
(particles or granules) circulation flux has
significant influences on the most gas-solid processes including the
circulating fluidized bedand the moving granular bed. However,
there are still no reliable and simple approaches in published studies for
monitoring the instantaneous variation of the solid circulation flux during
operation, especially under the industrial conditions. A real-time monitoring
method is developed for timely reflecting the instantaneous variation of the
circulation flux in a gas-solid process, by measuring the
pressure drop of the riser. In this study, two pressure taps
are set between a fixed distance at the wall of the riser. One tap is 0.5 m away from the top of the pre-lift
section; the distance between two taps is 4 m. The pressure drop
between the 4 m riser
 is recorded continuously
at 1 HZ by a digital manometer under a wide operating range. The experimental
data clearly shown that the pressure drop of the 4 m riser has a good linear variation with the solid circulation
flux. A theoretical correlation between the solid circulation flux and the
pressure drop is proposed. The parameters in this mathematical correlation
equation are
experimentally explored and induced for monitoring and predicting the solid
circulation flux.

Keywords: Gas-solid process; Solid circulation flux; Pressure drop; Riser