Boreskov Institute of Catalysis of the Siberian Branch of Russian ...

PP-III-32procedure presented by Mariani et al. [3] was employed. On the other hand, knowing theposition of the centre of each sphere, the contact point can be calculated in a computationalway.The results were compared with experimental values from bibliography and ownexperimental results. A satisfactory agreement was obtained for any value of the aspect ratio,which means an additional support to the capability of the algorithm proposed. As anexample, in Fig. 1, a comparison of experimental (Giese et al. [4]) and simulated results of theradial void fraction distribution is presented.1ε r0,9Experimental points (Giese et al., 1998)0,80,7Simulation0,60,50,40,30,20,100 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 5xFigure 1: Comparison of experimental and simulated results of the radial void fraction distribution.On the other hand, the results obtained allow to check that the fractions of the spherescontacting the wall diminishes as the aspect ratio increases. Besides, the average number ofparticles contacting each other (average contact number) varies significatively depending onwhether the particles contact the wall or not. A simple expression to predict the averagecontact number as a function of the fraction of particles contacting the wall is proposed.References1. Nijemeisland, M., Dixon, A.G., A.I.Ch.E. J., 50, 906 (2004).2. Salvat, W.I., Mariani, N.J., Barreto, G.F., Martínez, O.M., Catal. Today, 107-108, 513 (2005).3. Mariani, N.J., Martínez, O.M., Barreto, G.F., Chem. Eng. Sci., 56, 5693 (2001).4. Giese, M., Rottschäfer, K., Vortmeyer, D., A.I.Ch.E.J., 44, 484 (1998).364