Modeling gas oil spray coalescence and vaporization in gas solid riser reactor

The sprayed feed droplet behavior, including coalescence and vaporization into gas–solid flow, is complex especially near the atomizer region in fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) riser reactor. A three dimensional CFD model of the riser reactor has been developed, which takes into the account three phase hydrodynamics, heat transfer and evaporation of the liquid droplets into a gas–solid flow as well as phase interactions. A hybrid Eulerian–Lagrangian approach was applied to numerically simulate the collision and vaporization of gas oil droplets in the gas–solid fluidized bed. This numerical simulation accounts the possibility of coalescence of feed spray droplets in computing the trajectories and its impact on droplet penetration in the reactor. The modeling result shows that droplet coalescence mainly occurs at the initial part of the atomizing region and where three phase flow hits the reactor wall and bounces back. The model has the ability of inspecting the effects of feed injector geometry on the overall reactor hydrodynamic and heat transfer. The CFD simulation results showed that the evaporated droplet gas caused higher local velocities of the gas and solid particles and gas–solid flow temperature reduction.