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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jonathan McDonough, Dr Richard Law, Emeritus Dr David Reay, Dr Vladimir Zivkovic
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Pergamon Press, 2019.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
Additive manufacturing could be used to facilitate the rapid fabrication and testing of small-scale fluidized beds for use in screening applications, such as adsorbent screening for carbon capture. In this work, experiments were performed in order to map the different flow regimes produced in small-scale (Dh = 3–15 mm) gas-solid fluidized beds that were fabricated using additive manufacturing using the stereolithography approach. Here, the effects of bed hydraulic diameter (Dh), static particle height (Hs), and particle type/size (Dp and ρp) were considered. Pressure drop data and high speed camera images were used to develop simple flow regime maps for these printed beds showing the operating windows for packed bed, bubbling, slugging and turbulence applicable to a wide range of bed size to particle diameter ratios (Dh/Dp = 20–200) and gas velocities (Ug = 1–400 mm/s) in both ‘2D’ and ‘3D’ bed aspect ratios. Fast Fourier transforms of the pressure drop signals were also used to study the evolution of bubbling/slugging behaviour as the gas velocity was increased by creating 2D colour maps of the frequency spectra. These allowed a new quantitative method to be proposed for the identification of slugging – the point where the dominant frequency in the power spectrum becomes constant as the gas velocity increases. It is concluded in this study that the rougher surfaces generated by additive manufacturing do not influence the fluidization characteristics nor modify the wall effects of small-scale beds. Macro-scale fluidization could also be achieved at smaller Dh/Dp ratios in these 3D printed beds compared to more conventional Plexiglas beds (Dh/Dp = 75 compared to Dh/Dp = 300).
Author(s): McDonough JR, Law R, Reay DA, Zivkovic V
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Chemical Engineering Science
Year: 2019
Volume: 200
Pages: 294-309
Print publication date: 08/06/2019
Online publication date: 23/02/2019
Acceptance date: 27/01/2019
Date deposited: 28/02/2019
ISSN (print): 0009-2509
ISSN (electronic): 1873-4405
Publisher: Pergamon Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ces.2019.01.048
DOI: 10.1016/j.ces.2019.01.048
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