Transport disengagement height

Transport Disengaging Height. When the drag and buoyancy forces exerted by the gas on a particle exceed the gravitational and interparticle forces at the surface of the bed, particles ate thrown into the freeboard. The ejected particles can be coarser and more numerous than the saturation carrying capacity of the gas, and some coarse particles and clusters of fines particles fall back into the bed. Some particles also coUect near the wall and fall back into the fluidized bed. 

The distance above the catalyst bed in which the flue gas velocity has stabilized is refened to as the transport disengaging height (TDH). At this distance, there is no further gravitation of catalyst. The center-line of the first-stage cyclone inlets should be at TDH or higher otherwise, excessive catalyst entrainment will cause extreme catalyst losses. 

Chan and Knowlton (1984) also investigated the effect of system pressure on the transport disengaging height (TDH) over a pressure range of 1 to 30 bar. They found that TDH increased linearly with pressure over this range (Fig. 15). The effect of gas viscosity on TDH has not been determined experimentally by anyone thus far. 

Cyclones. According to the model presented above, Eq. (24), a minimum loss rate due to cyclone attrition requires to avoid both high inlet velocities Ue and high solids mass fluxes mc m at the cyclone inlet. The latter requirement can be fulfilled by locating the cyclone inlet above the transport disengaging height (TDH) (Kunii and Levenspiel, 1991). In addition, an enlargement of the freeboard section will reduce the amount of particles that are entrained and thus the mass flux, mc in. 

Freeboard. Under normal operating conditions gas rates somewhat in excess of those for minimum fluidization are employed. As a result particles are thrown into the space above the bed. Many of them fall back, but beyond a certain height called the transport disengaging height (TDH), the entrainment remains essentially constant. Recovery of that entrainment must be accomplished in auxiliary equipment. The TDH is shown as a function of excess velocity and the diameter of the vessel in Figure 6.10(i). This correlation was developed for cracking catalyst particles up to 400 pm dia but tends to be somewhat conservative at the larger sizes and for other materials. 

Figure 8. Estimation of transport disengaging height (TDH) according to Ref 41, umb = fluidization velocity at which bubble development begins...

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