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Poster Presentation 3-17
Flow Field in Shrinking-Bed Reactor for Pretreatment of Cellulosic Biomass
Yinkun Wan and Thomas R. Hanley
University of Louisville Speed Scientific School Louisville, KY 40208
Telephone: (502) 852-3022; Fax: (502) 852-1577; E-mail: y0wan001@louisville.edu
A shrinking-bed reactor was designed by NREL to maintain a constant bulking-packing density of cellulosic biomass. This high solid-to-liquid ratio in the pretreatment process would allow a high sugar yield to be obtained, thereby avoiding the need to flush large volumes of solution through the reactor. Previous research shows that the shrinking-bed reactor is a very promising pretreatment reactor and may be further scaled up to a commercial size.
To scale up the shrinking-bed reactor, it’s necessary to understand the flow pattern in the reactor. In this study, the flow field was simulated with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), in which a porous medium model was used. Different discrete “snap shots” and multiple steady states were utilized. Bulk flow patterns, velocity distributions, and pressure drops were obtained from the simulation and can be used to guide reactor design and scale-up.
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