Characterization of Swirling Fluidized Bed

This dissertation is intended to conclude and summarize the overall milestone of Final Year Project, Characterization of Swirling Fluidized Bed. In recent years, the Swirling Fluidized Bed has been regarded as one of the novel designs in fluidization technology. This new technique features an annular-blade distributor which injects the fluidizing gas through a certain inclination, is capable of fluidizing the bed and at the same time causes swirling motion of particles in a circular trajectory. In the present work, the fluidization characteristics and hydrodynamics of a swirling bed are studied using experimental approach. The behavior of gas-particle interaction in a swirling bed in terms of operation regimes, trends of pressure drop across particle bed and hysteresis effects of bed pressure drop with increasing superficial velocity of gas, are explored by varying bed configurations. Three different sizes of spherical Polyvinyl chloride particle, two sizes in irregular shape and two sizes in cylindrical form, are used as bed material by considering four bed weights from 500 g to 2000 g, with increment of 500 g in each step, three blade overlap angles of 9°, 15° and 18°, for air superficial velocities up to approximately 3.5 m/s and two blade inclination of 10° and 15°. In this report, a well-structured review of the literature is constructed to compile the critical and substantive discoveries in the past researches. Furthermore, detailed research methodology and detailed analysis of experiment results are illustrated and expounded. The findings explicitly show that the solid particle size, shape, and bed weight are the major variables that give significant impact on the fluidized bed characteristics, while the blade dimension has relatively smaller effect on the bed behavior. This project has, hopefully, revealed how everything responds in SFB and this correlated relationship could be a precious benchmark in designing a reactor bed. As a conclusion, the research is intended to demonstrate the superiority of SFB over conventional bed. Through this exploration, the author sincerely hopes that this project will become an achievable reference volume for every practitioner in this field, spanning the boundary of various disciplines especially for fluidization engineering.