Authors: James Parker and Andrew Larson
CPFD, LLC, 10899 Montgomery Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM
Abstract: Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has become a common engineering tool for the research, design, and optimization of chemical looping processes. Like many gas solid and liquid-solid chemical processes, chemical looping presents a significant modeling challenge for traditional CFD due to the industrial scale of the process units and the complex coupled particle-fluid dynamics, reaction chemistry, and heat transfer. With recent advancements in CFD modeling tools, chemical looping simulations can be more accurate and efficient than what was possible just a few years ago, in large part due to increases in model calculation rates afforded by improved computing hardware and improved parallelization of CFD software. In this work, the impact of these improvements is assessed using a chemical looping reactor model as a benchmark.