Bubble Motion in a Three-Phase Liquid Fluidized Bed

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This paper presents results for the rise velocities of air bubbles in liquids and liquid-solid fluidized beds. The bubble sizes ranged from approximately 0.03 to 0.45 cm radius. Tap water and distilled water were used as the fluidizing liquids. The solid phase consisted of low density alginate gel beads of mean radius 0.04 cm. The gel beads were translucent which permitted observation of bubbles inside the bed even at large solids volume fractions. Experiments were conducted for solids volume fractions ranging from 15% to 52% and in clear liquids. The goal of the experiments was to determine rise velocities of bubbles and to develop and evaluate correlations of bubble rise velocity based on bubble size, solids volume fraction and liquid properties. It was determined that, for moderate solids fractions (ranging from 28% to 45% solids), a semi-empirical correlation that treated the fluidized bed as a pure liquid with a higher viscosity than the liquid phase could be used to represent the data. The Thomas effective viscosity model was used to predict the viscosity. Provided that one restricts attention to a water fluidized bed, a second empirical correlation can be used to represent the data over a broader range of solids fractions.