Scale-up of the Circulating Fluidized Bed Methanation Reactor: A Numerical Study

Methanation of the syngas from biomass gasification is one of the key processes in the biomass-to-SNG technology. Circulating fluidized bed reactor turns to be suitable for the operation of methanation reaction with high exothermicity. The methanation reaction involves a sufficient reduction in the gas volumetric flow. Thus the scale-up of a circulating fluidized bed methanation reactor may have some differences from the traditional scaling-up criterion. In this research, the fluidization characteristics in circulating fluidized bed methanation reactors with different sizes are investigated with the numerical study. With the ’multi-scale visualization’ simulation results, reaction, hydrodynamics and mass transfer can be separately analyzed from both cluster scale and reactor scale, which can provide a theoretical basis for the optimization and scale up of methanation circulating fluidized bed reactor.