(359a) Common Fluidized Bed Reactors Failure Modes

The first commercial fluidized bed reactor, known as the Winkler coal gasifier, was developed over 100 years ago, and since then, many applications of fluidization have flourished. The advantages of fluidization, particularly in heat transfer and particle transport, have been widely recognized, leading to various successful commercial processes. These processes include fluid catalytic cracking (FCC), Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, SOHIO acrylonitrile, gas-phase polymerization, chemical looping combustion, and pyrolysis. More recently, fluidization has played a vital role in new applications related to clean energy and circular economy efforts, such as methane pyrolysis and plastic pyrolysis. As advances in modeling and artificial intelligence make scaling up more efficient in terms of time and cost, the well-established fluidized bed reactor is expected to find even more applications.

However, the failures of fluidized bed reactors over the past century have hindered their ability to deliver their full potential for chemical processes. Issues such as high rates of solids loss, attrition, agglomeration, erosion, loss of containment, channeling, and gas bypassing can lead to undesirable outcomes. Thus, an important question is how these issues arise and how they can be managed. Ensuring that fluidized bed reactors are failure-proof is crucial for enabling faster and more cost-effective scaling up these systems. This has motivated the current study to review past commercialization failures and, importantly, the underlying technical reasons for those failures. Understanding the causes of these failures is essential in avoiding similar mistakes and increasing the likelihood of success in future applications.