Effects of Mixing Using Side Port Air Injection on a Biomass Fluidized Bed

Fluidized beds are being used in practice to gasify biomass to create producer gas, a flammable gas that can be used for process heating. However, recent literature has identified the need to better understand and characterize biomass fluidization hydrodynamics, and has motivated the combined experimental-numerical effort in this work. A cylindrical reactor is considered and a side port is introduced to inject air and promote mixing within the bed. Comparisons between the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations with experiments indicate that three-dimensional simulations are necessary to capture the fluidization behavior of the more complex geometry. This paper considers the effects of increasing side port air flow on the homogeneity of the bed material in a 10.2 cm diameter fluidized bed filled with 500-600 $μm$ ground walnut shell particles. The use of two air injection ports diametrically opposed to each other is also modeled using CFD to determine their effects on fluidization hydrodynamics. Whenever possible, the simulations are compared to experimental data of time-average local gas holdup obtained using X-ray computed tomography. This study will show that increasing the fluidization and side port air flows contribute to a more homogeneous bed. Furthermore, the introduction of two side ports results in a more symmetric gas-solid distribution.