Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.46, No.12, 4236-4244, 2007
Four ways to introduce structure in fluidized bed reactors
Just like for fixed bed reactors, the rational structuring of fluidized beds is interesting from the point of view of process intensification. Structuring can facilitate scale-up and increase conversion and selectivity by controlling the size and the spatial distribution of the bubbles. We present four approaches to structure fluidized beds: oscillating the gas flow, imposing an electric field to induce interparticle forces, distributing the gas injection, and optimizing distributed particle properties such as particle size. Experimentally, we show that these methods can indeed lead to a drastic reduction of the bubble diameter in bubbling fluidized beds for a range of operating conditions. For two methodologies, imposing an electric field and distributing the gas injection, also a considerable increase in conversion is demonstrated.