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Flow, Turbulence and Combustion
Published in: Flow, Turbulence and Combustion 4/2019

16-11-2018

Experimental Study and CFD-PBM Simulation of the Unsteady Gas-Liquid Flow in an Airlift External Loop Reactor

Authors: Xia Lu, Bingwen Long, Yigang Ding, Fuli Deng

Published in: Flow, Turbulence and Combustion | Issue 4/2019

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Abstract

The performance of external loop airlift reactor (ELALR) strongly depends on local prevailing hydrodynamics. In this work, the hydrodynamics characterization of the gas-liquid flow is performed in a laboratory scale ELALR. The bubbles plume and the velocity field of the riser are captured using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) technique and a three-dimensional CFD-PBM simulation is implemented to provide a full description of the flow structure. The effects of superficial gas velocity on the flow structure and the time-averaged liquid velocity are quantitatively investigated and the numerical results are in reasonable agreement with the PIV measurement. The results show that the gas-liquid two-phases flow in the riser is always unsteady, and the bubble plume meandering behavior is observed clearly. Gas holdup increases with the increase of superficial gas velocity, while the liquid axial velocity shows a trend of first increase and then decrease and the maximum is observed at superficial gas velocity of 30 mm/s. With the increase of superficial gas velocity, the probability density function curve becomes flatter, and changes from unimodal to bimodal. This work helps to gain in-depth understanding of the complex fluid hydrodynamics behavior inside an ELALR.
previous article Experimental Investigation of Global Combustion Characteristics in an Effusion Cooled Single Sector Model Gas Turbine Combustor

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Appendix
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Metadata
Title
Experimental Study and CFD-PBM Simulation of the Unsteady Gas-Liquid Flow in an Airlift External Loop Reactor
Authors
Xia Lu
Bingwen Long
Yigang Ding
Fuli Deng
Publication date
16-11-2018
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Flow, Turbulence and Combustion / Issue 4/2019
Print ISSN: 1386-6184
Electronic ISSN: 1573-1987
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10494-018-9992-5

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