Fluidized beds emulsion phase

Suspended Particle Techniques. In these methods of size enlargement, granular soHds are produced direcdy from a Hquid or semiliquid phase by dispersion in a gas to allow solidification through heat and/or mass transfer. The feed Hquid, which may be a solution, gel, paste, emulsion, slurry, or melt, must be pumpable and dispersible. Equipment used includes spray dryers, prilling towers, spouted and fluidized beds, and pneumatic conveying dryers, all of which are amenable to continuous, automated, large-scale operation. Because attrition and fines carryover are common problems with this technique, provision must be made for recovery and recycling. 

The effectiveness of a fluidized bed as a ehemical reactor depends to a large extent on the amount of convective and diffusive transfer between bubble gas and emulsion phase, since reaction usually occurs only when gas and solids are in contact. Often gas in the bubble cloud complex passes through the reactor in plug flow with little back mixing, while the solids are assumed to be well mixed. Actual reactor models depend greatly on kinetics and fluidization characteristics and become too complex to treat here. 

Values for the various parameters in these equations can be estimated from published correlations. See Suggestions for Further Reading. It turns out, however, that bubbling fluidized beds do not perform particularly well as chemical reactors. At or near incipient fluidization, the reactor approximates piston flow. The small catalyst particles give effectiveness factors near 1, and the pressure drop—equal to the weight of the catalyst—is moderate. However, the catalyst particles are essentially quiescent so that heat transfer to the vessel walls is poor. At higher flow rates, the bubbles promote mixing in the emulsion phase and enhance heat transfer, but at the cost of increased axial dispersion. 

Mass transfer coefficient between the emulsion and bubble phases in a gas fluidized bed 11.45... 

The fluidization quality significantly decreased when the reaction involving a decrease in the gas volume was carried out in a fluidized catalyst bed. In the present study, we carried out the hydrogenation of CO2 and used relatively large particles as the catalysts. Since the emulsion phase of the fluidized bed with these particles does not expand, we expected that the bed was not affected by the gas-volume decrease. However, we found that the fluidization quality decreased and the defluidization occurred. We studied the effects of the reduction rate of the gas volume and the maximum gas contraction ratio on the fluidization behavior. 

It is reported [1] that the fluidization quality was drastically decreased when the hydrogenation of CO2 was carried out in a fluidized catalyst bed (FCB). Recently, the phenomena occurring in the bed were directly observed [2] and it was found that the upper part of the emulsion phase was defluidized and this packed particles was lifted up through the column like a moving piston. 

In the case of a FCB with small particles, the emulsion phase expands [5, 6, 7] when the bed is fluidized. This would make the bed sensitive to the decrease in the gas volume in the emulsion phase. If this assumption is true, we can postulate that the fluidization quality is hardly affected by the gas-volume reduction when the particles, which induce a small emulsion phase expansion, are used. The emulsion phase expansion decreases with increasing particle size and density [6]. In the present study, therefore, the particles used were larger and heavier than that generally used in the FCB. We carried out the hydrogenation of CO2 in a... 

Fig. 3 shows the emulsion phased expansion measured by the bed collapse method [10] under the reaction conditions. In this case, the value of a was 3.9. The expansion ratio when the bed was fluidized by only H2 shows that the emulsion phase slightly expanded, and that the ratio was not influenced by the temperature. On the other hand, when H2 and CO2 were supplied as fluidizing gases, the expansion ratio decreased with the reaction temperature when... 

Because of the inadequacies of the aforementioned models, a number of papers in the 1950s and 1960s developed alternative mathematical descriptions of fluidized beds that explicitly divided the reactor contents into two phases, a bubble phase and an emulsion or dense phase. The bubble or lean phase is presumed to be essentially free of solids so that little, if any, reaction occurs in this portion of the bed. Reaction takes place within the dense phase, where virtually all of the solid catalyst particles are found. This phase may also be referred to as a particulate phase, an interstitial phase, or an emulsion phase by various authors. Figure 12.19 is a schematic representation of two phase models of fluidized beds. Some models also define a cloud phase as the region of space surrounding the bubble that acts as a source and a sink for gas exchange with the bubble. 

Bubble Dynamics. To adequately describe the jet, the bubble size generated by the jet needs to be studied. A substantial amount of gas leaks from the bubble, to the emulsion phase during bubble formation stage, particularly when the bed is less than minimally fluidized. A model developed on the basis of this mechanism predicted the experimental bubble diameter well when the experimental bubble frequency was used as an input. The experimentally observed bubble frequency is smaller by a factor of 3 to 5 than that calculated from the Davidson and Harrison model (1963), which assumed no net gas interchange between the bubble and the emulsion phase. This discrepancy is due primarily to the extensive bubble coalescence above the jet nozzle and the assumption that no gas leaks from the bubble phase. 

An advantage of this approach to model large-scale fluidized bed reactors is that the behavior of bubbles in fluidized beds can be readily incorporated in the force balance of the bubbles. In this respect, one can think of the rise velocity, and the tendency of rising bubbles to be drawn towards the center of the bed, from the mutual interaction of bubbles and from wall effects (Kobayashi et al., 2000). In Fig. 34, two preliminary calculations are shown for an industrial-scale gas-phase polymerization reactor, using the discrete bubble model. The geometry of the fluidized bed was 1.0 x 3.0 x 1.0 m (w x h x d). The emulsion phase has a density of 400kg/m3, and the apparent viscosity was set to 1.0 Pa s. The density of the bubble phase was 25 g/m3. The bubbles were injected via 49 nozzles positioned equally distributed in a square in the middle of the column. 

Two-Phase Theory of Fluidization The two-phase theory of fluidization assumes that all gas in excess of the minimum bubbling velocity passes through the bed as bubbles [Toomey and Johnstone, Chem. Eng. Prog. 48 220 (1952)]. In this view of the fluidized bed, the gas flowing through the emulsion phase in the bed is at the minimum bubbling velocity, while the gas flow above U j, is in the bubble phase. This view of the bed is an approximation, but it is a helpful way... 

Essentially aggregative fluidization is a two-phase system there is a dense phase (sometimes reterred to as the emulsion phase), which is continuous, and a discontinuous phase called the lean or bubble phase. The simplitied assumption that all the gas over and above that required tor minimum fluidization flows up through the bed in the form ot bubbles is known as the two-phase theory. It the total volumetric flow ot gas is Q then... 

Porous or sintered plates are the ideal and are used in small-scale studies of fluidized bed behaviour (Kunii and Levenspiel, 1991) and form a highly expanded unstable gas-solid dispersion directly above the distributor which rapidly divides into a large number of small bubbles plus an emulsion phase. Bubbles grow rapidly thereafter by coalescence. Kunii and Levenspiel (1991) also suggest that other... 

Because of the higher density in the bed, cluster imaging was conducted during the period when a gas bubble passed the face of the horoscope. The clusters shown in Figure 11.8 are at a much lower solids concentration than that of the emulsion phase. It is unknown whether the clusters exist in the denser emulsion phase and get ejected into the less dense bubble phase, or if the clusters are solely a product of the bubble phase in the fluidized bed. 

As in the fluidized beds analysis (Section 3.8.3), a similar simplification has been made in Kunii-Levenspiel model for the material balances in the emulsion phase, where again the corresponding derivatives have been omitted (eqs. (3.529) and (3.530)). As in the case of liquid flow in trickle beds, the flow of the gas in the emulsion phase is considered too small and so the superficial velocities can be neglected. Thus, in trickle beds, from eq. (3.367),... 

Two-Phase theory of Davidson According to the two-phase theory, two phases exist in the bubbling fluidized bed (a) the bubbling phase consisting of gas bubbles, and (b) the particulate phase, namely the solids around the bubbles. The particulate phase is alternatively called the emulsion phase. Bubbles stay in the bubble phase and penetrate only a small distance into the emulsion phase. This zone of penetration is called cloud since it envelops the rising bubble. 

Figure 3.63 Volume fractions in a two-phase fluidized bed (where e denotes the emulsion phase).

Werther, J., Hydrodynamics and mass transfer between the bubble and emulsion phases in fluidised beds of sand and cracking catalyst, in Fluidization (eds. D. Kunii and R. Toei), Engineering Foundation, New York, 93 (1983)... 

Using the two-phase model, a fluidized catalytic bed reactor can be divided into two regions, one for the dense phase, i.e., the emulsion phase, and another for the bubble phase, with associated mass and heat transfer between the two regions and phases. 

---