FLOW MODELING OF A FLUIDIZED BED REACTOR USING COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS

Fluidized beds are widely used in the chemical, petroleum, pharmaceutical, and energy industries. They offer the cleanest and most sustainable alternative to fossil fuels essentially because of their cost competitiveness. These systems are generally employed for processes that require gas-solid contact. In order to simulate the interactions occurring in this reactor, the author modeled a similar reactor using computer-aided drafting (CAD) software, and the model was imported into the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program. The physics conditions were then set based on the multiphase interactions of the reactor involving the sand and nitrogen, with the tested volumetric flow rates of 1 L/min and 2 L/min, respectively. In this article, simulations of the fluidized bed reactor (FBR) have been done considering various operating conditions. The Eulerian-Eulerian approach has been adopted in this simulation due to its greater simplicity and to gain a better understanding of the velocity profiles and pressure variations for the multiphase reactor used in the Biofuels Laboratory.