A Conservative Macroscopic Model for Binary-mixture Fluidized Beds

Abstract

Two approaches are commonly used for modeling the vertical mixing of binary-mixture fluidized beds, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and macroscopic modeling. A common realization of the latter one is the Gibiralo–Rowe (G-R) model, which uses the Two-Phase Theory. This macroscopic model obviously overperforms CFDs regarding computational cost; however, determining its coefficients is a still challenging issue. Although several methods were published for solving this, the general problem with most of them remains their neglecting the conservation of mass. In the present new procedure, the mass conservation is applied to correct the values of the G-R model coefficients estimated from known equations. The present model was validated on a wide variety of fluidized bed systems. The results show that this conservative and macroscopic model gives more accurate predictions than the recently published other macroscopic models, and this one is, in general, better than the CFD model from the perspective of prediction accuracy as well.