Analysis of Throughflow Velocity in Two-Dimensional Fluidized Bed Bubbles

The formation of gas bubbles is one of the most characteristic phenomena of fluidized beds. Many unique properties of fluidized beds can be related directly to the presence of bubbles and are dominated by their behavior. Therefore, accurate prediction of parameters such as bubble shape and size, voidage variation and throughflow are practically important. In the present analysis, an approximate model, based on a strongly idealized picture of the bubble formation has been presented. The bubbling gas fluidized bed has regions of low solids density comprised of gas pockets or voids. The observed voids exhibited a variety of shapes (Halow and Nicoletti, 1992), depending upon the material and fluidization velocity. In the low-velocity experiments with the finer materials, rounded voids are observed. However, with coarser materials, voids were typically large and bluntnosed. In the image analyses work, reported by Gautam (1989), in a bed operating slightly above the incipient fluidization, elongated bubbles (a > b, as shown in Figure 1) were observed for glass beads (sp. gravity = 2.5) of mean diameter 500 μm and flattened bubbles (a < b) were seen for mean particle diameter of 350 μm. Also, he noticed the dependence of throughflow velocity on the elongation of the bubble as it traverses up the bed. Additionally, throughflow velocity was found to be independent of the excess gas flow rate through the bed. The digitized image of a typical bubble (refer Gautam et al., 1994) which shows that the bubble were elongated in the vertical direction and were more elliptical than circular. Therefore, description of a bubble on the basis of just one diameter, either the horizontal or the vertical or an equivalent diameter, as has been done by many researchers in the past, is rather incomplete. It is inferred from the present work that the bubble aspect ratio plays an important role in predicting an accurate gas flow through the bubble.