In Victoria, Australia, brown coal is utilised as a major source of energy for the power generation industry. Victorian and South Australian brown coals have a very high moisture content and therefore, the efficiencies of power generation in traditional pulverised fuel fired furnaces are low. Fluidised beds offer a number of advantages over conventional furnaces, leading to improvements in efficiency and environmental impact. A disadvantage with implementing fluidised bed technology is the issue of scale-up. Fluidised bed behaviour can alter significantly with changes in scale, because of their strong dependence on the bed hydrodynamics. Hence, there is a need to accurately model bed behaviour to ensure that the effect of changes in scale are well understood and will not become costly and time consuming.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques can be applied to fluidised bed systems to gain a better understanding of the hydrodynamic behaviour involved. In the past, numerical models have considered only single particle sizes due to the added complexity of interaction between particles of differing sizes and densities. Industrial fluidised beds typically contain more than one particle size and density, therefore there is a need to develop a numerical model which takes this into account. The aim of this thesis is to develop and validate CFD techniques for modelling the behavior of a gas-solid fluidised bed containing more than one particle size and density.
To provide validation data for the numerical model, physical experiments are undertaken on a small two-dimensional bubbling gas-solid fluidised bed. Mixing and segregation behaviour of different materials are investigated. The experiments demonstrate that whilst only a small proportion of the bed consists of different size/density particles, significant changes in bed behaviour are apparent. Changes in bubble rise velocity, bubble size and bubble shape are observed.
A number of constitutive equations must be included in the numerical model, including relationships for the momentum transfer between various phases and solids pressure. Different combinations of these constitutive equations are investigated. A new equation for particle-particle interactions is derived and included in a CFD model. The CFD model is validated against both data in the literature and physical experiments. From the validation studies, an optimum equation set is identified. This optimum equation set produces numerical results that closely resemble experimental bed behaviour, thus bringing the goal of solving scale-up problems one step closer. The use of this type of CFD model will ultimately result in timely and cost effective solutions for both the power generation and chemical processing industries.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216507 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Bell, Robyn Anne, Robyn.Bell@csiro.au |
| Publisher | Swinburne University of Technology. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.swin.edu.au/), Copyright Robyn Anne Bell |
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