A mixing behavior study of biomass particles and sands in fluidized bed based on CFD-DEM simulation

Abstract

The present paper studied the mixing characteristics of biomass and sands in a fluidized bed. A three dimensional model is calculated on the basis of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the discrete element method (DEM), while the lab-scale experiments under similar conditions are conducted. To investigate the mixing behavior of biomass and sands, particle distribution, particles time averaged kinetic motion and the Lacey index are analyzed and the effects of gas velocity and biomass size are discussed. Gas velocity provides the basic motion for particle movement and biomass particles gain a lot more kinetic motion than sands due to their large size. The biomass mixing process in a horizontal direction is more sensitive to gas velocity than in a vertical direction. Biomass size could slightly affect the mixing quality and a well mixing in fluidized bed could be reached if the size of biomass to sands is smaller than 4 times.