CFD simulation of bubbling and collapsing characteristics in a gas-solid fluidized bed

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has become an alternative method to experiments for understanding the fluid dynamics of multiphase flow. A two-fluid model, which contains additional terms in both the gas- and solid-phase momentum equations, is used to investigate the fluidization quality in a fluidized bed. A case study for quartz sand with a density of 2,660 kg/m³ and a diameter of 500 μm, whose physical property is similar to a new kind of catalyst for producing clean fuels through the residue fluid catalytic cracking process, is simulated in a two-dimensional fluidized bed with 0.57 m width and 1.00 m height. Transient bubbling and collapsing characteristics are numerically investigated in the platform of CFX 4.4 by integrating user-defined Fortran subroutines. The results show that the fluidization and collapse process is in fair agreement with the classical theory of Geldart B classification, but the collapse time is affected by bubbles at the interface between the dense phase and freeboard.