In recent years, CFD has played an important role in the understanding and design of TBR’s. In this work, through CFD with Eulerian approach, a three-phase heterogeneous reactor model was developed, were the accuracy of Interfacial Momentum Exchange Model (IMEM) for the gas-solid interaction, the effect of a more detailed catalytic bed geometry description, and the pellet shape over TBR hydrodynamics of two fluid phases interacting with the solid phase was studied. Then, a second model was developed, where the validated hydrodynamic model was coupled with mass transport for an HDS process of light gasoil. Additionally, in order to insight into the scaling up process of a TBRs, the proposed columns behaviors were compared against literature columns using four different ways, and it was found that the best predictions were obtained when the models’ holdup were equaled to those evaluated in literature columns. Since in reliable literature deviations in pressure drop predictions of around 30% can be found, the model results show significant improvement against literature, achieving 5 times better accuracy in predicting pressure drops, and 50% improvement in holdup prediction; the coupled model reproduces the same conversion values compared with literature data, and predicts conversions with 95% accuracy

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With a Euler-two-phase (E2P) approach, through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques, a mathematical model for the prediction of the local hydrodynamic behaviour of a gas-solid fluidized bed was implemented.Simulations are conducted for a fluidized bed of 0.14 m internal diameter packed with Gerdart B glass beads particles, with an average diameter of 365 μm, at dimensionless inlet velocities ranging from14 . The implemented model considers the multiphase and multiscale interactions through the inclusion of three sub-models, which allows the model to have a broad range of applicability. Predictions were compared against experimental measurements reported on previous contributions for validation purposes. The experimental study was conducted by implementing advanced measurement techniques, such as a differential pressure transducer, and an optical fibre probe for simultaneous measurement of solids holdup and velocity, developed at the Multiphase Flow and Reactors Engineering and Applications Laboratory (mFReal). Local radial solids holdup, solids velocity, and pressure drop profiles were experimentally determined. Results show that the implemented model possesses a high predictive quality, predicting pressure drops with an average absolute relative error (AARE) between 8.6%-11.3%; solids holdup with a root mean squared deviation (RMSD) under 5%; and solids velocity with a RMSD under 22%.

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