A high efficiency CFD simulation strategy for industrial fluidized b 2026 Fu

When computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed on large-scale industrial gas – solid fluidized bed reactors with long solids residence time, it is a common issue that the solids conversion at the outlet will take a very long time to reach a steady state if an initial uniform distribution of solids conversion is set. Accordingly, the needed simulation time is often unaffordable. To solve this issue, we proposed a new high-efficiency CFD simulation strategy which needs much shorter time to achieve a steady state of solids conversion at the outlet. First, a 'small reactor' with nearly identical hydrodynamic and reaction characteristics to the industrial fluidized bed reactor is established, which is used to simulate for enough time to obtain a steady-state solids conversion distribution. Second, the solids conversion distribution is applied and set to be the initial solids conversion distribution for the industrial reactor, which enables the simulation of the industrial reactor faster to reach a steady state. The accuracy and the high efficiency of this strategy have been validated in this study by an example of an industrial methanol-to-olefins (MTO) fluidized bed regenerator. Even including the simulation for the small reactor, the saved total time is bigger than 50%. Moreover, the strategy is not only applicable to single-stage fluidized bed reactors, but also effective for predicting large-scale multistage fluidized bed reactors where the initial solids conversion distributions in each stage or chamber can be obtained first from the simulation of a small reactor of nearly identical hydrodynamic and reaction characteristics.