(95al) A Study on Partially Wetted Particle Collisions with a Wet Wall

For the production of poly-ethylene, a gas-phase polymerization reaction is executed in a fluidized bed reactor. The polymerization reaction produces an excess of heat and the reactor is unable to efficiently remove the excess heat. The introduction of an Inert Cooling Agent (ICA) solves the temperature problem but also has a downside. Introducing the ICA in the reactor influences the particle collisions, leading to substantially different flow behavior. Besides the reduction of the restitution coefficient, the introduction of the liquid can result in adhesion instead of collision. This adhesion results in the formation agglomerates in the reactor and reduces the efficiency of the process. Due to the complex physics of this problem, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a suitable method to gain insight in this phenomenon.

In order to study this complex system of partially wetted particle collisions a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) is used for incompressible flow. To model the coupling between the solid phases and the fluid phase, a second order accurate Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) is used (Deen et al.,2012). The interface between the fluids is tracked by a Volume Of Fluid (VOF) method (Baltussen et al., 2017). The contact-line dynamics are solved by imposing a contact angle as a boundary condition (Patel et al., 2017).

The simulated results will be compared with dry particle collisions on a wet wall (Tang et al., 2017) and with wet particle collisions on a wet wall.

References:

1. Deen, N.G., Kriebitzsch, S.H., van der Hoef, M.A. and Kuipers, J.A.M., Direct numerical simulation of flow and heat transfer in dense fluid–particle systems. Chemical Engineering Science, 81 (2012): 329-344.

2. Baltussen, M. W., Segers, Q. I. E., Kuipers, J. A. M., and Deen, N. G., Cutting bubbles with a single wire. Chemical Engineering Science 157 (2017): 138-146.

3. Patel, H.V., Das, S., Kuipers, J.A.M., Padding, J.T. and Peters, E.A.J.F., A coupled Volume of Fluid and Immersed Boundary Method for simulating 3D multiphase flows with contact line dynamics in complex geometries. Chemical Engineering Science, 166 (2017): 28-41.

4. Tang, Y., Buck, B., Heinrich, S., Deen, N.G., Kuipers, J.A.M., Interface-resolved simulations of normal collisions of spheres on a wet surface. American Institute of Chemical Engineers, (2017).