Effects of the superficial gas velocity on the distribution of solid particles in the circulating fluidized bed using CFD simulations

Abstract. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of various air flow rate or
superficial gas velocity in term of excess air to obtain the optimum distribution of solid phase in
the Circulating Fluidized Bed (CFB). The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method used
for simulations uses the Multi-fluid Eulerian approaches incorporating the Kinetic Theory of
Granular to calculate the motion of particles and the standard k-ε turbulence model to simulate
the fluid flows. The simulations were carried out using five different air mass flow rates, based
on the air consumption in the combustion of coal used in real CFB boiler operation. Since this
simulation is the preliminary study of the particle dynamics in CFB, the combustion process had
not simulated yet. In this work, the complex flow has been resolved by applying the CFDSOF
commercial CFD software. The pressure on bed, the distribution of pressure, the particle velocity
and volume fraction in the CFB were investigated to obtain the optimum results of the
fluidization. The values of the pressure found from experiments at the bottom of bed was around
4,500 Pa, and the results from simulations were not different significantly with this values. At
the excess air of 90%, the velocity of particles at the surface of bed is highest that can lead to the
erosion on the firewall in long term operations, meanwhile at the lower excess air values, their
velocity were relatively small. The optimum of excess air that found to be safe for boiler to
operate was around 60% - 75% for average particle size 1 mm.