Abstract
Fluidization process is widely used by a great assortment of industries worldwide; one of these processes is the mass transfer from an immersed body to a fluidized gas bed. This work presents an experimental study of a continuous gas-solid fluidized bed with a porous material placed at the bottom of the column to support the packing material. Sand-air-naphthalene system has been used in this work. Sand with sizes distributed between 75-250 microns was used as solid fluidizing particles and air was used for fluidization in a 70 cm height and 8 cm inside diameter fluidization Column. Naphthalene was selected for this study as the immersed object, this have been done by making a spheres of wood of 2.9 cm outside diameter and coating this spheres wood with Naphthalene by dipping this spheres into a bath of molten naphthalene (at about 900C). An empirical correlation was developed for mass transfer of naphthalene vapor into air-sand fluidized bed by using experimental data of many variables such as temperature, air velocity, and sand particle size. The experimental results of the mass transfer in the present work have been compared in curve in Yokota,s coordinate with many documented experimental literatures data. The comparison gave a very good agreement, and show that Sherwood number increased slowly with the increase in gas velocity at constant surface temperature and particle size.
