The goal of this experimental effort is to validate the new mechanistic scale-up methodology for hydrodynamics similarity of gas-solid fluidized bed reactors that our team has been developing. It is based on maintaining similar or closer radial profiles of gas holdups in two different sizes (0.14 m, and 0.44 m in diameter) gas-solid fluidized beds to achieve both local and global similarity of the dimensionless hydrodynamic parameters. This is because the gas dynamic dictates the hydrodynamics of these beds. The new scale-up methodology has been successfully validated by assessing for the first time the local hydrodynamic parameters such as time averaged cross-sectional distributions and radial profiles of gas and solids holdups at different axial levels measured by gamma ray computed tomography (CT) technique and particles velocity field and turbulent parameters (Reynolds stress, normal stresses, turbulent kinetic energy, and turbulent eddy diffusivities) measured by radioactive particle tracking (RPT) technique. The experimental results showed that achieving similarity in the radial profiles of the gas holdup in the geometrically similar beds is essential for ensuring closer or similar local and global hydrodynamics similarity. As the differences increase in terms of magnitude and trend in the gas holdup radial profiles between two beds, the differences increase in detailed hydrodynamics.
