DEM-CFD study of flow in a random packed bed

Most catalytic surface reactions as well as other industrial applications take advantage of fixed packed bed reactors. Designers of these reactors rely mostly on empirical formulas derived for various simplifying assumptions, e.g. uniformly distributed porosity. The made simplifications and especially the assumption of uniformly distributed porosity fail if the tube to particle diameter ratio goes under 10 and the „wall effect“ becomes more significant. In such a case, the complete three-dimensional structure of the packed bed has to be considered. Thanks to ongoing improvements in numerical mathematics and computational power, the methods of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have become a great tool for comprehensive description of the packed beds with low tube to particle diameter ratio. Three-dimensional simulations of the flow through two fixed beds differing in the type of the used particle are presented and compared with available experimental and empirical results. To generate the random fixed beds, we propose a custom approach based on the discrete element method (DEM) code implemented in open-source software Blender. Thereafter, OpenFOAM tools (snappyHexMesh, simpleFoam) are used for creation of the computational mesh and solution of the governing equations describing a single-phase flow in the packed bed