A Unified Correlation for the Prediction of Heat Transfer Coefficients in Liquid/Solid Fluidized Bed Systems

Abstract

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the development of solid-liquid fluidized bed heat exchangers for efficient utilization of energy and for the control of heat transfer surface fouling. However, the design for optimum heat transfer remains uncertain and essentially empirical. In this study, a data bank containing a large number of measured heat transfer coefficients over a wide range of operational parameters (solid and liquid phase physical properties and heat transfer surface configurations) are compared with the prediction of almost all available correlations in the literature. A unified model for the prediction of heat transfer coefficients for wall-to-bed and immersed heater-to-bed systems is presented which predicts the published experimental data with good accuracy.