Scale effects on fluidized bed hydrodynamics

Industrial history is full of events related to scale-up challenges. Failure at the scale-up stage is no longer surprising. Engineers and scientists have been trying to gather all the key parameters for decades, but, unfortunately, there are still no exact and well-established rules ensuring an accurate transition from one scale to another. Even the minimum lab-scale fluidized bed is still undefined. In this work, the effect of bed diameter on gas-solid behavior is investigated in three fluidized beds, 152mm, 78mm, and 50mm in diameter, in which the conventional scale-up rules are respected. The experiments were carried out using sand and alumina particles. The results were obtained and confirmed using fiber optic techniques and radioactive particle tracking, respectively. The results show that radial solid hold-up behavior on a small bed diameter scale is completely different from that on the intermediate bed diameter scale. The radial profile of solid hold-up on a small and very small bed diameter indicates an increase from a low value near the wall to a high value at the center at different heights from the distributor. By contrast, the opposite profile is observed on the intermediate bed diameter, similar to what is usually reported in the literature.