Design optimization of a fluidized bed with a novel air chamber using the CFD-Taguchi method

Abstract

The gas–solid fluidized bed is the key structure of industrial fluidization, and it is widely used in fields such as chemical reactors and industrial material conveying. To study the uniformity of velocity distribution ( Vu) in a fluidized bed and clarify the interaction mechanism between the geometric structure of the air chamber and the gas flow, in this paper, 16 novel chamber structures for powder unloading were designed based on the Taguchi method. Computational fluid dynamics was used to simulate the different chamber schemes, and the effects of various geometric factors on the response were analyzed based on the Taguchi method. The effect of the novel optimization model for powder unloading was verified by tests. The results show that the optimal combination of geometrical parameters is air chamber capacity ( V) at level 4, separation ratio ( K) at level 1 and clearance of splitter plate ( δ) at level 1, and δ has the greatest effect on the Vu1 and Vu2 in the fluidized bed. With the increase in δ and K, the velocity of the airflow away from the inlet side increases, and the area of the vortex near the splitter plate increases. Compared with the baseline model, the fluidized bed with the novel air chamber can effectively reduce the residual rate of powder unloading.

Drag reduction of Clark-Y hydrofoil by biomimetic fish scale structure under the condition of biomimetic jet

“…In Taguchi's algorithm, the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) refers to the power ratio of signal to noise. It is generally divided into three signal-to-noise ratios, namely, large-the-better (LTB), small-thebetter (STB) and nominal-the-better (NTB) (Wang et al, 2021a;Wang et al, 2021b) For the two responses in this study, a higher lift-drag ratio is preferred. Thus, the signal-to-noise ratio with high hope characteristics is selected.…”

“…Li et al (Yan et al, 2022) obtained the optimal active jet structure through the Taguchi design of three parameters, namely, jet position, jet ratio and angle between jet and aerofoil surface, reducing the cavitation volume of the aerofoil to only 29.95% of the original aerofoil. Wang et al (Wang et al, 2021a;Wang et al, 2021b) carried out the Taguchi design of the fluidised bed gas chamber and the airway and conducted numerical and experimental analyses to obtain the parameter combination with the lowest powder discharge residual rate and the best velocity distribution uniformity. Bai et al, 2022 carried out Taguchi design on eight parameters of the impeller meridian profile of the submersible electric pump, resulting in a 3.5% increase in head and a 6.1% increase in efficiency after model optimisation.…”