On the scaling laws for bubbling gas-fluidized bed dynamics

Abstract In a bubbling gas-fluidized bed, some of the forces acting on the fluid may be neglected when compared with the force of interaction between the fluid and the particles. In addition, if one considers only the bulk movement of the particles, rather than the motion of individual particles, the difference between inertial and viscous contributions to the total drag force may become insignificant. It is shown in this paper that under these conditions the general similarity criteria can be reduced to two or three dimensionless groups. Furthermore, experiments conducted in two two-dimensional fluidized beds of different sizes confirm the validity of the simplified similarity relations derived in this work.