A universal drag model for liquid-solid fluidization: Experiment, data-driven modeling, CFD modeling and simulation

Various industrial applications are performed in liquid-solid fluidized beds where drag force plays a significant role in affecting the expansion characteristics of granular-bed, and then determines the mass/heat transfer performance. This study employs dimensionless learning data-driven modeling method, which is derived from the principle of dimensional invariance, to automatically discover the relationship between the drag coefficient and hydraulic dimensionless numbers from the liquid-solid fluidization data. It is found that the Fr number ($=u_l^2/\left({\mathrm{gd}}_s\right)$) also plays important role in improving the prediction accuracy of drag model except for Re number ($=d_s{u}_l{\rho }_l/{\mu }_l$). The proposed data-driven modeling method has desired robustness, and the yielded drag model can be applicable to other liquid-solid systems, such as water-polystyrene spheres and water-coal particles, although it is derived from the fluidization of spherical glass beads in rising tap-water. The proposed drag model can also provide good CFD simulation results that agree very well with the experiment data with the relative error less than 5 %.