Circulating turbulent fluidization - A new fluidization regime or just a transitional phenomenon

While circulating fluidized bed (CFB) reactor has many advantages over the more conventional turbulent fluidized bed (TFB) reactor, it does at least have one significant shortcoming - the rather dilute solids volume concentration in CFB reactor gives rise to less ideal reaction intensity. On the other hand, while having higher reaction intensity, TFB reactor has one fatal drawback of particle back-mixing, making it not suitable for certain reactions such as catalytic reaction where the catalyst requires frequent regeneration. This paper describes some key issues in the development of a circulating turbulent fluidized bed (CTFB) reactor that combines the advantages of both TFB and CFB, that is, to have the high reaction intensity as in TFB but and also to have a suppressed solids back-mixing as in CFB due to a continuous net upflow of solids flux through the bed. Experimental results show enough evidence to suggest that a new fluidization regime is formed, the characteristics of which appears to be distinct from those observed in a regular TFB and from those in either the bottom or the upper sections of regular CFB and/or high-density CFB (HDCFB). Fundamentally, the difference is that particle-particle interaction (collision) dominates the motion of particles in CTFB and TFB, while gas-particle interaction (drag force) is the key element that determines the two phase flow in CFB including HDCFB.