Simulation study of the effect of the restitution coefficient on interphase heat transfer processes and flow characteristics in a fluidized bed

Abstract

This article discusses a simulation study performed to investigate the effect of particle collision on inter-particle and gas–solid heat transfer processes, and other related bed flow characteristics. The effect of particle elasticity is presented using different values of the particle–particle coefficient of restitution. The simulation study was carried out using a two-dimensional model of a fluidized bed reactor incorporated to ANSYS Fluent 16.2 software. Two different materials, steel beads and sand particles, were used as the bed material fluidized by air. The simulation results are compared to those from previous studies on fluidized bed reactors containing a single bed material. The coefficient of restitution affected the bed hydrodynamics. Specifically, an increasing coefficient of restitution resulted in an increasing bed pressure drop and decreasing void fraction, granular temperature, particle velocity, and collision frequency. Conversely, increasing the particle coefficient of restitution resulted in decreasing the particle–particle heat exchange coefficient and the gas–particle heat transfer coefficient. The gas–particle heat transfer coefficient for sand particles was higher than that for steel beads. The effect of the coefficient of restitution on the flow characteristics from a binary mixture bed was quite similar to those of single material beds found in previous studies. This study demonstrated that the restitution coefficient clearly affected both the particle–particle and gas–particle heat transfer processes.