CFD Multiphase Modeling of Fluidized Bed using FLUENT® 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.