Effect Of Particle Density On Particle Motion Of A Swirling Fluidized Bed With Mesh-Type Distributor To Improve The Efficiency Of Fluidization Process

Abstract

Since its first development, fluidized bed had been used to a wide range of industrial application that involve chemical and mechanical processes. Numerous conventional fluidized beds have been developed including centrifugal fluidized bed, vibro-fluidized bed, tapered fluidized bed, spouted fluidized bed, etc. However, there are several shortcomings of these conventional fluidized beds that become the challenges of efficiency in processing materials. Further, these shortcomings affect the quality of fluidization in relation to moving parts, particle mixing, pressure drop, hydrodynamics, and limitation in using variety particle sizes. Thus, a new technology of fluidized bed was introduced. Swirling Fluidized Bed (SFB) is a recent technology on fluidized bed developed by researchers that acknowledged as current best options in the industry as this type of fluidized bed able to provide better quality of fluidization, such as, no moving parts in the process, uniform motion of particles influence to excellent particles mixing, reduces elutriation, lower pressure drop, and allows application of variety particle sizes. SFB has several variants of bed distributor; the most popular one is SFB with annular distributor. As it develop, it is found that high level of bed pressure drop is become major drawbacks of the current SFB with annular distributor. Thus, a new variant of air distributor is introduced, since air distributor in SFB hold a key role in distributing gas into bed column in which responsible for fluidization of the particles. There has been no published experimental study on the particle motion or behavior especially particle velocity of SFB with mesh type distributor. Therefore, an experimental study of the particle motion and velocity in SFB with mesh-type distributor is needed to fulfill this gap. The experiment was conducted in a laboratory scaled SFB with Mesh-type Distributor and wire mesh with 2.8mm2 size is used in this experiment for the distributor. Three different sizes of sphere PVC particle (6mm, 4mm, and 3mm) were selected for the investigation of the effect of particle size. Four different density of sphere PVC particle (1.77 g/cm3, 2.99 g/cm3, 2.21 g/cm3 and 2.65 g/cm3) were selected for the investigation of the effect of particle density. Superficial velocity of the air entering the bed was adjusted within the range of producing stable swirling regime of operation and the bed weight varied from 500 g to 1250 g with increment of 250 g, were used. The results exhibit that SFB with Mesh-type distributor provided advance improvement than annular distributor in term of efficiency. SFB with Mesh-type distributor needs less superficial velocity to get the particles fluidized despite the increasing bed weight, thus lower bed pressure drop is produced for the fluidization process as the output. Keyword: Fluidization, Swirling Fluidized Bed, air distributor, PIV, particle study.