Author

Rana Sabouni

Date of Award

2009

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Engineering Science

Program

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering

Supervisor

Dr. Cedric Briens

Second Advisor

Dr. Franco Berruti

Abstract

Many industrial applications, such as fluid catalytic cracking, fluid coking, and gas phase polymerization, use liquid injection into fluidized beds of solid particles.. Therefore, it is of crucial importance to study the mechanism of liquid injection into fluidized beds in order to ensure the best possible distribution of the feed, maximizing the yield of valuable products while minimizing the formation of undesired agglomerates, and, thus, preventing mass and heat transfer limitations.

The objective of this Thesis are: to investigate the potentially beneficial effects of fluctuations on the liquid feed distribution on the particles in the fluidized bed at various operating conditions by imposing fluctuations of well-defined frequency and amplitude on the liquid flow upstream of a spray nozzle; to study the effect of creating natural pulsations on the liquid feed distribution with non-mechanical methods over different operating conditions; and, finally, to compare different spray nozzles geometries under pulsating flow conditions. To achieve these objectives several experiments were conducted in a laboratory-scale fluidized bed filled with silica sand and fluidized with air. Thesis results illustrated that nozzle pulsations significantly improved the spray nozzle performance and the liquid distribution under the different studied operating conditions.

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