Cfd Modeling of Gas-Liquid-Solid Fluidized Bed : Intensive investigation on three-phase fluidized bed

Gas-liquid-solid fluidized beds are used extensively in the refining, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, food and environmental industries. Some of these processes use solids whose densities are only slightly higher than the density of water. Because of the good heat and mass transfer characteristics, three-phase fluidized beds or slurry bubble columns have gained considerable importance in their application in physical, chemical, petrochemical, electrochemical and biochemical processing. The first part discusses about importance of gas-liquid-solid fluidized bed, their modes of operation, important hydrodynamic properties those have been studied either related to modeling or experimental analysis and applications of gas-liquid-solid fluidized bed. The second part gives an overview of the methodology used in CFD to solve problems relating mass, momentum and heat transfer. Also comparative study of various CFD related software is given in this section. Third part contains the details about problem description and approach used in FLUENT to get the solution. Finally results of simulation and comparison with experimental results are shown.