Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.51, No.26, 8891-8902, 2012
Euler-Lagrange CFD Simulation of a Gas-Liquid Fluidized Bed Reactor for the Mineralization of High-Strength Phenolic Wastewaters
A state-of-the-art Euler-Lagrange model was developed to simulate the ozonation of phenol-like pollutants in a bubble column reactor. First, several numerical simulations were performed to evaluate on how the bubble velocity and oxidant concentration can improve the detoxification of liquid effluents by noncatalytic ozonation. Second, the effect of inlet ozone velocity as well as the influence of inlet ozone concentration has been investigated comparatively under different process conditions. We found that the Eulerian-Lagrangian computations have correctly handled the experimental observations in the quasi-homogeneous flow regime both in terms of the gas liquid velocity distributions and normalized pollutant concentration. The numerical confidence exhibited by the CFD simulations underlined the ozonation-based technology as one promising application to improve the environmental performance of bubble columns, which is typically operated under the low-interaction regimes, especially when the mass transfer of ozone is rate controlling and affects the mineralization rate. The interstitial flow maps have been successfully correlated with total organic carbon concentration profiles as function of inlet ozone velocities and concentrations. Moreover, the multiphase CFD framework gathered positively the mixing degree induced by different inlet bubble velocities as demonstrated by the total organic carbon concentration mappings and experimental conversion data.