Numerical study of the effect of the gas and solids distributors on the uniformity of the radial solids concentration distribution in CFB risers

The non-uniform radial solids distribution usually has a negative effect on the performance of the circulating fluidized bed (CFB) riser since it may greatly decrease the reactor efficiency and controllability. In order to improve the performance of industrial CFB risers, the numerical study of the effects of the gas distributor and solids distributor at the CFB riser inlet on the uniformity of the radial solids distribution was carried out in this study. Two potential approaches to improve the uniformity of radial solids concentration profile were proposed: (1) the use of the center-sparse side-dense air jets arrangement for the gas distributor and (2) the use of the side-covered arrangement for the solids distributor. The Eulerian-Eulerian computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model with kinetic theory of granular flow was adopted to simulate the gas-solids two-phase flow in a CFB riser with FCC particles. The numerical results show that the patterns of the inlet gas distributor and solids distributor have significant effect on the flow structure in both the entrance region and the fully-developed region in the riser. The gas distributor with center-sparse side-dense air jet arrangement improves the uniformity of the radial solids distribution, while the center-dense side-sparse air jet arrangement steepens the non-uniformity of the solids radial profile. The core-annulus structure can be greatly flattened by applying a side-covered solids distributor, while it can be heavily steepened by employing the center-covered solids distributor.