New hydraulic insights into rapid sand filter bed backwashing using the Carman–Kozeny model

Fluid flow through a bed of solid particles is an important process that occurs in full-scale water treatment operations. The Carman–Kozeny model remains highly popular for estimating the resistance across the bed. It is common practice to use particle shape factors in fixed bed state to match the predicted drag coefficient with experimentally...

Fluidization of spherical versus elongated particles: Experimental investigation using magnetic particle tracking

In biomass processing fluidized beds are used to process granular materials where particles typically possess elongated shapes. However, for simplicity, in computer simulations particles are often considered spherical, even though elongated particles experience more complex particle–particle interactions as well as different hydrodynamic...

Nonspherical particles in a pseudo-2D fluidized bed: Experimental study

Fluidization is widely used in industries and has been extensively studied, both experimentally and theoretically, in the past. However, most of these studies focus on spherical particles while in practice granules are rarely spherical. Particle shape can have a significant effect on fluidization characteristics. It is therefore important to...

A granular Discrete Element Method for arbitrary convex particle shapes: Method and packing generation

A novel granular discrete element method (DEM) is introduced to simulate mixtures of particles of any convex shape. To quickly identify pairs of particles in contact, the method first uses a broad-phase and a narrow-phase contact detection strategy. After this, a contact resolution phase finds the contact normal and penetration depth. A new...

Non-spherical particles in a pseudo-2D fluidised bed: Modelling study

Fluidised beds are used in a variety of processes because of their favourable mass and heat transfer characteristics. In this and many other processes, non-spherical particles are commonplace, which can drastically affect the fluidisation behaviour. In this study, we use numerical models to study non-spherical fluidisation behaviour in detail...