A CFD Study on Spouted Bed

A spouted bed is a solid-fluid contactor in which a jet of fluid is injected vertically through a centrally located single orifice at the bottom of the vessel. Spouted beds are used in many physical and chemical processes like drying, combustion, film deposition, coal gasification, catalytic conversion, etc. It is an alternative technique to fluidization, for handling coarse particulate solids, since conventional fluidization tends to slug formation with large particle size. Although the hydrodynamics of spouted bed is very much different from fluidized bed, the areas of application of spouted beds overlap with those of fluidized beds. Cyclic agitation of particles in a spouted bed is caused by a steady axial jet of fluid. Knowledge of bed hydrodynamics, heat, and mass transfer is crucial for designing, scaling up, and optimizing spouted beds. In this work, a pseudo-two-dimensional system is used to thoroughly examine the hydrodynamics and heat transfer characteristics of a spouted bed. A Two-Fluid Model, based on Eulerian-Eulerian approach, in which both the continuous gas phase and the dispersed particle phase are treated as interpenetrating continua., is implemented to simulate and demonstrate predictions for gas and solid phase dynamics and temperature distribution inside the bed. A sensitivity analysis has also been conducted on the model to assess the influence of the characteristic parameters on the solution.