Dynamic analysis of the scale-up of fluidized beds

•Measured pressure fluctuations were used for scaling studies in fluidized beds.•Dynamic scaling of gas-solid fluidized bed was studied by RP and RQA.•Entropy was used to improve the Glicksman's method of scaling.•A new empirical correlation was proposed for the scale-up of fluidized beds.

A method is developed for hydrodynamics scale-up of gas-solid fluidized beds based on recurrence quantification analysis of nonlinear time series of pressure fluctuations. This method is an improvement of the previous method by including the entropy of pressure fluctuations to the list of scale-up parameters. Experiments were carried out at varying conditions, e. g., bed diameter (5, 9, 15, 40 and 80 cm ID), particle size (150, 300, 400 and 600 μm), bed height at aspect ratios (1, 1.5 and 2) and superficial gas velocities (ranging 0.1 to 1.7 m/s) to identify the main parameters that influence the dynamics and to develop a general interpretation of the analysis results. By investigation of the effect of operating parameters on entropy, a quantitative empirical correlation is proposed for including the entropy in the scale-up parameters. It was shown that this correlation improves the Glicksman's method for the scale-up of fluidized beds.

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