Prediction of Liquid Holdup and Solid Holdup in Three-phase Fluidized Bed: Air/Newtonian and non-Newtonian Liquid Systems

V. Sivakumar, K. Senthilkumar and P. Akilamudhan

Abstract
Three-phase fluidizing beds have emerged in recent years as one of the most promising devices for three-phase operations. Such a device is of considerable industrial importance in chemical and biochemical industries, wastewater treatment and other biochemical processes. For the design and development of three-phase fluidized bed reactors, knowledge of hydrodynamic parameters viz., liquid holdup and solid holdup is essential. Hence, in this paper, an attempt has been made to study the effect of fundamental and operating variables on liquid holdup and solid holdup. Besides, on the basis of the experimental results, the correlations were developed to predict these holdups in a three-phase fluidized bed using Newtonian and non-Newtonian systems covering a wide range of operating and fundamental variables. The statistical analysis showed that the predictive ability of the present proposed correlations is found to be a good fit with present experimental data and literature data.

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Keywords
liquid holdup, solid holdup, multiphase reactors, non-Newtonian liquids