A study on heat transfer in a conical fluidized-bed reactor with an immersed cylindrical heater

In this paper, numerical and experimental analyses of the heat transfer between an immersed heater and a cone bed of sand particles were carried out. A three-dimensional (3D) model using the Eulerian–Eulerian model coupled with the kinetic theory for granular flow was used to simulate heat transfer and the related bed flow characteristics. The effects of different inlet gas velocities, represented by the fluidizing number (the ratio between inlet gas velocity to minimum fluidizing velocity), and different particle-wall boundary conditions on heat transfer and hydrodynamics were investigated. Both the experiments and numerical simulation results showed that the heat transfer coefficient and the bed expansion ratio increased with increasing the inlet gas velocity. For the particle-wall boundary condition, applying the no-slip condition showed the best agreement in the heat transfer coefficient and the bed expansion ratio to the experimental results.