Study of the fluid flow pattern in a bubble column reactor for biodiesel production

Abstract

The applications of bubble column reactor (BCR) are very important as multiphase reactors in process industry. In biodiesel production, one of the reactors that are used is BCR. The advantages of BCR are low operating cost and maintenance due to the compactness and no moving parts. It is important to understand the nature of hydrodynamics and operational parameters to characterize their operation, including gas superficial velocity and bubble rise velocity to make the design and scale-up process. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be used to evaluate the performance of BCR at lower cost compared to the experimental setup for biodiesel production. In this work, a commercial CFD software, FLUENT 14.0 was used for modeling of gas-liquid flow in a BCR for biodiesel production. Multiphase simulations were performed using an Eulerian-Eulerian two-fluid model. In this study, the simulation was conducted by using three different temperature, which are 523 K, 543 K and 563 K. The CFD result predicts the turbulent kinetic energy, gas hold-up and the liquid velocity were fairly good, although the results seem to suggest that further improvement on the interface exchange models and possibly further refine the two-fluid modeling approaches are necessary especially for the liquid velocity and turbulent kinetic energy.