CFD Multiphase Modeling of Fluidized Bed usingFLUENT® Software

Basically this report discusses the preliminary research done and surface understanding about the chosen topic, CFD Multiphase Modeling of Fluidized Bed using FLUENT® Software. A fluidized bed is formed when a bulk quantity of a solid is forced to behave like a fluid; usually by the forced introduction of pressurized fluid, often a gas through the particulate medium. For this project, spouted bed was chosen as the main fluidized bed. The spouted bed is simulated using FLUENT software. Fluent basically is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) computer program designed for modeling fluid flow and heat transfer in complex geometries. Simulation of fluidized bed is important in order to understand the particle behavior and effect of heat and mass transfer in the fluidized bed because in real working plant, the real fluidized bed is hard to be observed. A few variables were tested during this simulation: different in density of granule, air velocity, diameter size of granule and total simulation time. The conditions applied for this spouted bed are 3 m/s of air velocity, operated at 300.15 K of temperature and 101325 Pa of pressure. The 2-D spouted bed was modeled first in GAMBIT and all of the boundary condition required was selected and meshed. Then the meshed spouted bed was exported into FLUENT using double precision calculation to simulate the problem. As a conclusion, density of 750 kg/m was selected to be the applicable density to be used because it formed a good fluidized bed among the others. Meanwhile when using 2000 kg/m of granule density, granule diameter size of 0.0003 m was chosen since that size of granule gave a balance result, which is fluidized bed was formed at the middle level of spouted bed height. Longer iteration time does not represent more accurate data was produced. This was proven when by using 0.5 s oftotal simulation time was sufficient enough to get the required result.