New paper published in Chemical Engineering Journal from UCL Centre for Nature-Inspired Engineering

A new paper has been published in Chemical Engineering Journal from the UCL Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering (CNIE), in excellent collaboration with Ghent University LCT (group of Kevin Van Geem and Guy Marin). Laurien Vandewalle from Ghent spent a productive couple of months with us in the NICE Group at UCL Chemical Engineering, co-advised by Victor Francia (now Ass.Prof. at Heriot-Watt University) and Marc-Olivier Coppens. This resulted in this article, which can be downloaded for free until 5 January here .

We demonstrate how "dynamically structuring" a fluidised bed by gas pulsation compartmentalises the solids circulation. This is important, because it decouples the time scales for macro- and micro-mixing with controlled circulation, in this way combining desired features of fixed, moving and (ordinary) fluidised beds. This simplifies scalability and opens a pathway to control particle processing (for drying, coating, reactions, etc.). Our fundamental analytical modelling, in combination with CFD-DEM simulations, shows that dispersion is driven by advection and NOT diffusion.

Reference: L. Vandewalle, V. Francia, K. Van Geem, G. Marin, M-O. Coppens, 2021, Solids lateral mixing and compartmentalization in dynamically structured gas-solid fluidized beds, Chem Eng Journal, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2021.133063 [Link]