EXPERIMENTAL OBSERVATIONS OF FLUIDIZED BEDS AT ELEVATED PRESSURES

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Abstract
The object of the work described here was to elucidate the effects of operation under pressure on the physical behaviour of gas fluidized beds. Extensive measurements of various bubble properties such as size, shape and rise velocity in beds of coarse powders (mean particle diameters of 184 μm and 450μm) operated at pressures of up to 81 bar were made by photographing the images created by irradiation of the bed with X-rays, and analysing the bubble silhouettes thereby obtained. Most of the results presented here are averages of some 200 individual measurements. Experimental evidence to support the following picture of the effect of pressurization on the behaviour of freely bubbling gas fluidized beds is presented. Both bubble interaction (tendency to coalesce) and the incidence of bubble splitting increase with increasing pressure; the two are intimately connected. The nett results are a decrease in bubble size with increasing pressure over most of the pressure range and an increase in the tendency for bubbles to distribute non-uniformly in a radial direction. This latter tendency probably causes gross solids circulation in the bed, and this in turn leads to higher bubble rise velocities than those observed for single bubbles under similar conditions. The splitting mechanism accounting for the decrease in bubble size was found to be intrusion of the wake into the bubble void by the flow of gas through the wake region of a leading bubble during pair coalescence. An updated review of other published work relating to the subject of experimental observations of the effects of pressure on gas fluidized beds is included in the form of a table.

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