Experimental study of flow in a plenum chamber of a swirling fluid bed

In the present study an experimental system is constructed for verification of the numerical approach used in designing the plenum chamber of a swirling fluidized bed. The airflow entering the plenum chamber is measured by a pitot static probe inserted into the inlet pipe of the chamber. Static pres...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Othman , Safiah, Nordin, Normayati, A. Wahab, Abas, R. Raghavan, Vijay
Format: Conference or Workshop Item
Published: 2011
Subjects:
Online Access:http://eprints.uthm.edu.my/4602/
http://eprints.uthm.edu.my/4602/1/icmme2011_submission_K.safiah.pdf
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Summary:In the present study an experimental system is constructed for verification of the numerical approach used in designing the plenum chamber of a swirling fluidized bed. The airflow entering the plenum chamber is measured by a pitot static probe inserted into the inlet pipe of the chamber. Static pressure tapings are provided at two planes on the plenum chamber in order to obtain the pressure drop across it. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is used to visualize the flow and provide 2D quantitative information about the velocity field. From the resulting outputs, the pressure drop across the plenum without a cylindrical hub implanted at the centre was found to be higher than with it. Although the existence of hub increases the viscous friction due to more area in contact with fluid, the more pronounced form drag caused by the abrupt flow expansion in the empty bed is greatly reduced in the column with hub. Furthermore, elimination of losses near a wide region at the column center give the latter set up an advantage with respect to pressure loss. As a result, less pressure drop across the chamber with a hub incorporated is of evident. Also obtained are the 2-D airflow vectors in the plenum chamber as captured using PIV apparatus. The flow vectors are essential in understanding the general aerodynamics in the test unit. In addition, computational software could provide the velocity magnitudes of the flow. These data are essential to validate the numerical codes.