Õ¬ÄÐÊÓƵ

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

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, []