Studies on Design of Bio Semi Fluidized Bed Reactor

Mixing is an important unit operation encountered in chemical and allied industries. Mixing can be achieved by many ways. One such way is fluidized bed. The efficiency of conventional fluidized bed is enhanced by semi- fluidized bed reactor. It is a novel type of fluid-solid contacting device. The semi fluidized bed is characterized by a fluidized bed and a fixed bed in series with single contacting vessel. Any improvement in the fluidized section of semi fluidized bed will increase overall efficiency of semi fluidized bed. This can be achieved by employing stirrer/mixing elements in fluidized section of semi fluid bed reactor. To design the semi fluidized bed as a reactor the knowledge of hydrodynamics, mass transfer, suspension characteristics and Residence time should be known. For this purpose, experiment was conducted in 0.1m internal diameter semi fluidized bed. Hydrodynamic behavior was studied and finally a correlation for pressure friction factor was derived based on the experimental results.