Assessment of scale-up designs for a diameter-transformed fluidized bed reactor with MP-PIC simulation

Abstract

Scale-up has always been the bottleneck to the development of new industrial processes. This study aims to assess the scale-up effects of a diameter-transformed fluidized bed (DTFB) reactor through three-dimensional, multi-phase particle-in-cell (MP-PIC) simulation with the Energy-Minimization Multi-Scale (EMMS) drag and solid stress model. Four 3.5 Mt/a DTFB reactors are designed by scaling up a 1.2 Mt/a one with different scale-up schemes and simulated after validation. It is found the Glicksman’s rule shows the most similarity in solid concentration distribution to the benchmark case while the FixedOperation rule under-predicts the solid concentration, meaning that only keeping constant U_g and G_s cannot guarantee the same distribution of solid concentration when scaling up the fast fluidized bed. In addition, all four scale-up designs ensure the same gas velocity, yet they exhibit varying solid velocities throughout the scale-up process. A more rational scale-up rule is required for the elaborate reactor scale-up