An Experimental Study of Gas Flow Regime and Pressure Drop in a Random Packed Bed with Sinter Particles

The gas flow regime and pressure drop in a gas–solid packed bed with irregularly shaped sinter particles were experimentally investigated. Using a self-made experimental facility for data measurement, the gas flow pressure drop in a sinter bed layer was determined for various experimental conditions. According to the changes in the modified coefficients, α and β , for different flow regimes, the flow transitions from one regime to another in packed beds with different particle diameters were described. Furthermore, the pressure drop correlations for different flow regimes were determined, and the reliabilities of the obtained correlations were contrastively analyzed. The results show that, when the particle diameter is constant, the modified pressure drop per unit height, Δ P / Hu , increases linearly with the increasing gas superficial velocity. When the gas superficial velocity is larger than 1.15 m/s under atmospheric conditions, the gas flow regime in the sinter bed layer is the turbulent flow. Compared with the experimental correlation of the whole flow, the pressure drop correlations obtained by the piecewise fitting method provided a better prediction of the experimental values, and the average deviations of the obtained correlations for the Forchheimer flow and the turbulent flow were 5.31% and 4.07%, respectively.