Scale-up of an electrical capacitance tomography sensor for imaging pharmaceutical fluidized beds and validation by computational fluid dynamics

The aim of this research is to apply electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) in pharmaceutical fluidized beds and scale up the application of ECT from a lab-scale fluidized bed to a production-scale fluidized bed. The objective is to optimize the design of the production-scale fluidized bed and to improve the operation efficiency of the fluidization processes. This is the first time that ECT has been scaled up to a production-scale fluidized bed of 1.0 m diameter and batch process capacity of 100 kg in a real industrial environment. With a large-scale fluidized bed in a real industrial environment, some key issues on the ECT sensor design must be addressed. To validate ECT measurement results, a two-phase flow model has been used to simulate the process in a lab-scale and pilot-scale fluidized bed. The key process parameters include solid concentration, average concentration profiles, the frequency spectrum of signal fluctuation obtained by the fast Fourier transfer (FFT) and multi-level wavelet decomposition in the time domain. The results show different hydrodynamic behaviour of fluidized beds of different scales. The time-averaged parameters from ECT and computational fluid dynamics are compared. Future work on the ECT sensor design for large-scale fluidized beds are given in the end of the paper.