As with any well-founded engineering program, the goal of the holistic curriculum is to prepare students to embark on a career in which their success is conditional on life-long learning, critical thinking and decision making, teamwork, leadership, and commitment. Rather than assuming that these qualities will be instilled in our students as they travel through a well-crafted sequence of challenging engineering courses, the faculty explicitly demands that these objectives be met by collaborating on courses, through coordinated design projects among as many as eight different courses and six different professors, and by continual assessment and improvement. Students are encouraged and required to teach other students concepts that they have mastered. While we are constantly changing, this culture existed in our department before any of the present faculty arrived, and we believe that it can be created in other departments.
A study on the flow of power‐law fluids through a multi‐particle system including both fixed bed and fluidized bed is presented. Equations for the pressure drop, the minimum fluidization velocity, and the bed expansion are obtained by extending the Blake‐Kozeny's equation for the pressure drop through packed beds to power‐law fluids. Bed expansion equations are also obtained by extending the Richard‐son‐Zaki's theory for the drag force in a multiparticle suspension to power‐law fluids. These equations are compared with experimental data.
Γ‐ray attenuation method was applied to determine the axial fluidizing bulk density profile for an air‐solid aggregative fluidized bed. Except for beds fluidized at very high air velocities two distinct density zones were noted. The density of the bed in the lower portion of the column was relatively constant for a particular set of operating conditions and did not vary with bed height. The density in the top portion of the bed fell rapidly with bed height.
The average density of the lower zone was correlated as a function of the operating variables. The density in the top zone was represented by a one‐tail normal distribution curve. A somewhat better correlation was obtained by a two‐parameter equation at high air velocities. The effects of operational variables, such as air velocity, static bed height, particle size, and particle‐size distribution on these correlations were investigated.
Friction‐factor correlations based on two different definitions of bed height were also obtained.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.