Performance evaluation of different approaches for early detection of defluidization

Identifying the onset of an agglomeration phenomenon at an early stage in processes utilizing gas-solid fluidized beds that operate under the influence of cohesive interparticle forces affords enough time to apply counteractive strategies and avoid a disastrous agglomeration of particles potentially leading to complete bed defluidization. In this work, we compare the performance of different leading approaches proposed in the open literature for the advanced detection of defluidization. The approaches include the single-signal-monitoring of evolutions of total bed pressure drop (1,2), standard deviation of pressure signals (3,4), or -value from the attractor comparison analysis (5) as well as the simultaneous-monitoring of temperature and in-bed differential pressure signals during the process (6,7). The results show that the simultaneous-monitoring of temperature and in-bed differential pressure signals provided the best prediction of the onset of agglomeration, e.g., in Figure 1 during a defluidization test for which the defluidization incident occurred during solid fuel combustion. This approach, however, demonstrated the least sensitivity to the changes in gas velocity, operating temperature, and bed inventory. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract