Review of Three Phase Reactor CFD Simulations and Existing Challenges

With respect to crucial role of chemical reactors in different chemical units such as, oil, gas and petrochemical industries, survey and define of optimum operating conditions is important. Analysis and evaluation of mixing and transport phenomena in different operational conditions and for variety of reactor type is very useful and effective. With presence of side equipments such as baffle, agitator (impeller), turbine and gas distributor (sparger), especially. In this paper, CFD simulation of three phase reactor which was perfomed two recent decades has been reviewed. Most of the previous studies have been directed towards the understanding the complex hydrodynamics, and its influence on the phase holdup and transport properties. Recent research on three-phase reactors focuses on two topics, flow structure quantification, flow regime identification. Most of these CFD studies are based on steady state, 2-D axisymmetric, Eulerian multi-fluid approach. But in general, three phase flows in reactors are intrinsically unsteady and are composed of several flow processes occurring at different time and length scales. Even though a large number of experimental studies have been directed towards the quantification of flow structure and flow regime identification for different process parameters and physical properties, the complex hydrodynamics of these reactors are not well understood due to complicated phenomena such as particle–particle, liquid–particle and particle–bubble interactions. For this reason, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been promoted as a useful tool for understanding multiphase reactors for precise design and scale up. Also, there is scarcely any report focusing on hydrodynamic studies related to 3-D transient simulation with high solid content on fluidised bed reactors in literature.