Análise fluidodinâmica da variação da razão de aspecto de partículas cilíndricas em leito fluidizado

Abstract

The environmental impact caused by the combustion of mineral coal in thermal plants stimulates researches for sustainable alternatives. One of the alternatives may be the replacement of coal by biomass in fluidized bed reactors. The particle minimum fluidization velocity is a fluid dynamics parameter that strongly influences the behavior in fluidized bed reactor designs. Most academic papers use the sphericity as one of the main parameters in their correlations. Other studies state that the aspect ratio greatly influences the minimum fluidization velocity. Using a fluidized bed reactor with perforated plate distributor, cylindrical bamboo particles with aspect ratios of 2, 4 and 6, belonging to group D of the Geldart classification, were fluidized. In the experimental results it was possible to observe that the aspect ratio influences the minimum fluidization velocity. The results were compared with other authors, where five were sufficiently close within a variation of 20% of the values obtained in the experiments. As fluidization behaved like a spout, it was compared with spout correlations, where a single correlation achieved differences below 20% than the values obtained in the experiments, while the other correlations obtained larger differences. A new correlation was proposed based in the Ergun equation replacing sphericity by the aspect ratio and adjusting its coefficients. In this new correlation the calculated minimum fluidization velocity values were close to the experimental results within a range of 15%.