Information required on Fluid bed project

M Choudhury

Hi all!

I was just surfing the WEB and found this excellent site!

I'm a student from England doing Environmental Technology. Currently i am in a college in Copenhagen involved with another four students doing the European Project Semester. The aim of our project is to design a fluid-bed for a catalyst manufacturing company. This fluid-bed is to be used as a cooling medium for a catalytic laboratory reactor.

We would be very greatful if anyone can provide us with any materials, suggestions or comments related to the topic.

To make the scenario a bit clear we would like to give you the project brief below:

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Nowadays company X faces problems like not having efficient cooling systems. First of all they produce catalysts, 200g is taken randomly from 1000kg of production and tested in a laboratory reactor. Each test requires temperatures from 350'C to 450'C, but the problem is that it cannot reach 500'C because then the catalysts deactivate and become useless. In fact molten salt (which they use) is not a proper cooling medium. The process of testing takes 24hrs and then it takes another 2hrs to be able to open the tube and remove samples.

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We have already decided that we will produce the container from stainless steel, the particles would be sand grains (0.6mm diameter) ane the gas we will use would be air. But we have a lot of problems like the size of grains, amount of airflow etc. We are also finding it difficult to calculate the Reynolds Number (Re) and the Archemedies Number (Ar) since various book gives differenct equations.

We would like to add that the pressure in the tube is neglegible, and the reactor tube has to be 1m long, 16mm internal diameter and 20mm external diameter. 200 Watts of heat has to be transported away.

Thank you very much in advance M Choudhury & the EPS Team