CFD-DEM simulation of minimum fluidization velocity for gas-solid medium

Abstract

This article investigates the use of coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and discrete element methods (DEM) to simulate fluidization behavior of particle in the fluidized bed. This technique uses the Eulerian and the Langrangian methods to solve fluid and particles, respectively. The particle motion is coupled with the volume averaged conservation of mass, momentum and energy equations over discretized domain. The particle-particle and particle-wall interaction is modeled using the contact mechanics, which applied equations of Hertz-Mindlin no-slip contact. In this study, phenomenon of minimum fluidization velocity ( ) and maximum bed pressure drops (∆P_max) were studied with 5 different sizes of particles 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2 and 2.5 mm diameters. The simulation results showed that the  increased with increasing the particle diameters. As the number of particle increased, the  and ∆P_max increased. The results were found in good agreement with theoretical data available in the literature.