Multiphase flow reactors such as trickle bed reactors are frequently used reactors in many industries. Understanding the fluid dynamics of these kinds of reactors is necessary to design and optimize them. The pressure drop and liquid saturation are the most important hydrodynamic parameters in these reactors, which depend highly on the porosity distribution inside the bed. The eXtended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) was applied as a numerical approach to model multiphase flow through packed beds of solid particles. This method has the ability to be coupled with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) through interphase momentum transfer which makes it suitable for many Eulerian− Lagrangian systems. The XDEM also calculates the porosity distribution along the bed, which not only eliminates the empirical correlations but also makes it possible to investigate the maldistribution of liquid saturation inside the bed. The results for the hydrodynamics parameters were compared with experimental data, and satisfactory agreement was achieved.

The role of molten iron and slag in the dripping zone of a blast furnace is very critical to reach a stable operational condition. The existence of several fluid phases and solid particles in the dripping zone of a blast furnace, makes the newly developed eXteneded Discrete Element Method (XDEM) as an EulerianLagrangian approach, suitable to resolve the dripping zone of a blast furnace. In the proposed model, the fluid phases are treated by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) while the solid particles are solved by Discrete Element Method (DEM). These two methods are coupled via momentum, heat and mass exchanges. The main focus of current study is to investigate the influence of packed properties such as porosity and particle diameters, calculated by the XDEM, on the fluid phases for isothermal. In order to present the capability of the XDEM for this application. The validity of the proposed model is demonstrated by comparing model prediction results with the available experimental data.

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The XDEM multi-physics and multi-scale simulation platform roots in the Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) and is being developed at the Institute of Computational Engineering at the University of Luxembourg. The platform is an advanced multi-physics simulation technology that combines flexibility and versatility to establish the next generation of multi-physics and multi-scale simulation tools. For this purpose the simulation framework relies on coupling various predictive tools based on both an Eulerian and Lagrangian approach. Eulerian approaches represent the wide field of continuum models while the Lagrange approach is perfectly suited to characterise discrete phases.Thus, continuum models include classical simulation tools such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) or Finite Element Analysis (FEA) while an extended configuration of the classical Discrete Element Method (DEM) addresses the discrete e.g. particulate phase. Apart from predicting the trajectories of individual particles, XDEM extends the application to estimating the thermodynamic state of each particle by advanced and optimised algorithms. The thermodynamic state may include temperature and species distributions due to chemical reaction and external heat sources. Hence, coupling these extended features with either CFD or FEA opens up a wide range of applications as di-verse as pharmaceutical industry e.g. drug production, agriculture food and processing industry, mining, construction and agricultural machinery, metals manufacturing, energy production and systems biology.