3D-computational fluid dynamic simulation of fluid flow in a rotating packed bed

Rotating packed bed(RPB) has been widely used in absorption,desorption,distillation,oxidation,production of nanoparticles.The RPB utilizes centrifugal acceleration to intensify mixing and mass-transfer processes.However,because of the complexity of fluid flow inside the RPB,the flow experiments are not easy to lead to the deeper understanding on the fluid dynamics in an RPB.In this paper,computational fluid dynamics model and 3-dimensional physical models to describe the RPB have been developed.Numerical simulation of the fluid flow in an RPB using commercial software,Fluent,as a computational platform has been carried out.Different flow velocities,rotational speeds,have been systematically investigated.The preliminary simulation results show that the models to describe the RPB can give rise to better understanding of the flow in an RPB.