Assessment of the TFM in predicting the onset of turbulent fluidization

Abstract Accurate prediction of the onset of turbulent fluidization still remains elusive owing to the dependence of the transition velocity on several factors including measurement methods and interpretation of results. In this work, numerical simulations using the two fluid model (TFM) are performed in an attempt to predict the regime change reported by Gopalan et al. (2016) in a small scale pseudo-2D gas–solid fluidized bed containing Geldart D particles. Various time and frequency domain analyses were applied on predicted absolute and differential pressure time series data to reveal the bed dynamics. Numerical predictions of the transition velocity, U c are in reasonably good agreement with experimental results from the small scale challenge problem. The literature correlations completely fail to predict the transition velocity for the system considered in this work. This work thus provides a different approach for validating the CFD model against experimental measurements.