CFD Modeling of Polyethylene Fluidized Bed Reactor

Poly propylene (PP) is one of the famous polymers with great application. In this study, CFD model on dynamics of the fluidized bed polyethylene production process has been investigated. A detailed CFD model for sticky poly propylene fluidized bed was formulated in this work. As a result, detailed information on the PSD and hydrodynamic fields of the gas and solid phases can be obtained from the simulations. Defluidization due to particle aggregation also can be simulated. For modeling plant-scale poly propylene reactors, a chemical look-up table should be used to solve efficiently the solid species equations.. In order to address all the issues in FB polymerization, models for simplified polymerization kinetics, polydisperse multiphase flow, and mass and heat transfer between the gas and solid particles are combined together. As a result, physically aggregation because of atactic polypropylene is more important than other aggregation reasons. Finally, as mentioned earlier, after DQMOM is applied to the multi-fluid CFD model, new terms accounting for the effect of aggregation and breakage need to be added on the right-hand sides of the solid-phase momentum, energy, and species equations. These modifications and detailed simulation results for plant-scale fluidized bed polymerization reactors will be reported in future communications.