(87f) The Effect of Bed Depth on the Hydrodynamics of a Fluidized Bed of Fcc Catalyst

Fluidized beds have broad applications in many chemical, pharmaceutical, and mineral processing industries. The bed depth, which is directly related to the material inventory of the fluidized bed, is an important operating parameter in these various applications. Achieving specific efficiencies or throughput can lead to the necessity of employing deep fluidized beds. In these cases, keeping sufficiently long gas residence times, low particle entrainment, and a good fluidization quality possess special importance.

In this work, pressure fluctuations as a measure of the fluidized bed hydrodynamics has been used to perform a comparative analysis of the influence of different bed depths. For this purpose, the absolute and differential pressure fluctuations have been measured in several locations along the fluidized bed column for various combinations of gas velocities and bed depths and also two distributor designs. Both classical and advanced signal analysis methods have been employed to extract and evaluate useful information regarded to the fluidized bed behavior in different bed depths.