A heat transfer corrected isothermal model for CFD modeling of biomass devolatilization in fluidized beds

Isothermal models, which neglect particle internal heat transfer, are commonly used in computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling of biomass devolatilization in fluidized beds. However, for large biomass particle, the particle internal heat transfer influences significantly the devolatilization, and therefore needs to be considering in CFD modeling. In this work, a heat transfer corrected isothermal model presented in our pervious paper [1] was implemented in Eulerian-Eulerian methods to simulate a batch bubbling fluidized bed for biomass devolatilization. Compared to the conventional isothermal model, the heat transfer corrected isothermal model shown similar computational efficiency of CFD simulations, but for large biomass particles resulted in a lower heating rate and devolatilization rate, which are in better agreement with the observations in particle-scale experiments and simulations. The results demonstrate that the developed heat transfer corrected isothermal model is applicable in CFD modeling of devolatilization of large biomass particles in fluidized beds-