The sintering process of ceramic particles is a gas-solid two-phase flow, which is frequently encountered in many industrial fluid flow processes. This paper presents a computational modeling study of gas-solid flow in a fluidized bed furnace by means of threedimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and a discrete phase model (DPM) using a commercial computational fluid dynamics code, FLUENT® 6.3.26. The motion of ceramic particles is calculated by DPM. In DPM, the flow of hot air is described by a momentum conservation equation. A simulation is performed in the furnace by varying the additional inlet mass flow rates and the distributor's hole diameter across the values 2.2 mm, 1.8 mm, 1.4 mm and 1.0 mm. Through this simulation, it is possible to visually observe the temperature and velocity distribution inside the furnace, and we can optimize the process parameters such as hole diameter of the distributor and mass flow rates of an additional inlet for the sintering of the ceramic particles. Numerical results of a three-dimensional fluidized bed are compared to experimental results in order to validate this model.

Keywords: Fluidized bed, Discrete Phase Model (DPM), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Gas-Particle flow.