(54aq) Full-Loop Simulation of Gas-solids Flow in Circulating Fluidized Bed of FCC System

Circulating fluidized beds are widely used in petrochemical, coal, metallurgy, and other industrial fields. A typical circulating fluidized bed (CFB) includes the riser, gas-solid separator, downer and solids flow control device. To obtain detailed information and get better understand of gas-solids flow in CFB, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) had been applied extensively in many systems such as circulating fluidized bed combustion (CFBC) systems and fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) systems. In most studies, the riser, the core part in CFB system, was isolated as a single simulation object by applying proper boundary conditions. However, there are some limitations of riser-only simulation, without consideration of dynamics in solids circulation rate and effects of other part of CFB system. Therefore, the full-loop simulation is a more promising way to describe complex gas-solids interaction in CFB by treating the whole CFB system as a simulation object. Nowadays, most of current full-loop simulations were focused on CFBC systems, there was little work about FCC system, with different type of particles and recycle mechanism from CFBC system.

In this work, both full-loop and riser-only simulations were carried out by TFM approach to investigate a pilot-scale gas-solid circulating fluidized bed of FCC system which has been set up in our group. The simulation condition was chosen according to experiments with different superficial gas velocity, valve opening and fluidizing air flow rate. Detailed comparison between full-loop and riser-only numerical simulations has been conducted with respect to the hydrodynamics inside the riser, which showed full-loop simulation had advantages on predicting dynamics of solids circulation rate and the gas-solids flow behavior. Distribution of pressure, solids holdup and velocity in system was investigated which was helpful to understand the hydrodynamics in CFB. The effects of operating condition were then studied, which revealed the system stability mechanism.