LAUSR

Abstract The residence time distribution (RTD) of particles in a gas-solid dense fluidized bed with a continuous solid flow operation and baffles needs much more focus for the purpose of the wide industrial applications. The available models of solid RTD are not adequate in this case due to the additional convective diffusion induced by the cross-flow of the solid feeding and the complex geometry caused by the baffles. To address this problem, this work applied a two-phase Eulerian-Eulerian model combined with the species transport equation to predict solid RTD in a dense fluidized bed. The effects of the continuous solid feeding and baffles were considered. The solid dispersion coefficient Ds in the species transport equation was calculated by an analytical solution from kinetic theory of granular flow. Ds only needs the value at a molecular level due to the fact that the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is able to reproduce the RTD procedure exactly same as the practical experiments. To validate the established CFD model, a series of 3D lab-scale cold flow experiments were conducted in the free and baffled beds for the bed material with various severe non-spherical shapes. The measurement included the solid hydrodynamic characteristics at the outlet of the outflow pipe and solid RTD of the system. The reasonable agreement between the CFD prediction and experimental data demonstrated the good performance of the CFD model. 1D plug flow with dispersion model and the tanks-in-series model were further used to fit the calculated RTD curves. The estimated lateral dispersion coefficient of solids locates in a rational range compared with the data collected extensively from the literature. The results showed that the lateral dispersion coefficient of solids decreases when the baffles are installed.