Simulation and characterisation of packed columns for cylindrical catalyst supports and other complex-shaped bodies. (English) Zbl 1381.74226

Farsi, Ado; Xiang, J.; Latham, John-Paul; Carlsson, M.; Stitt, E. H.; Marigo, M.

Li, Xikui (ed.) et al., Proceedings of the 7th international conference on discrete element methods, DEM 7, Dalian, China, August 1–4, 2016. In 2 volumes. Singapore: Springer (ISBN 978-981-10-1925-8/hbk; 978-981-10-1926-5/ebook). Springer Proceedings in Physics 188, 397-406 (2017).

Summary: Catalyst pellets are packed in reactor beds and the shape and mechanical properties have a major influence on the reactor performance by virtue of (i) the detailed topology of the void space and grain surface area and (ii) the fragility of the pack to withstand in-service stresses within the solid skeleton – often through thermal and cyclic stressing. The paper highlights the features of the FEMDEM code used to simulate these performance-related properties of the pack. The local porosity, packing structure, bulk porosity and orientation distributions of the resulting bodies making up the pack of pellets will be presented. The generic methodology illustrated is shown to be suitable for shape optimisation of industrial packing processes.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1361.00015].

MSC:

74S30	Other numerical methods in solid mechanics (MSC2010)
74E20	Granularity

References:

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