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Pressure fluctuation instability in vertical plug formation of coarse particles with a non-mechanical feeder

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A Correction to this article was published on 05 February 2022

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Abstract

Plug conveying receives attention due to its advantages such as low particle attrition, low pipeline wear, and low energy consumption. Based on the background of pneumatic transportation of absorber spheres in the small absorber sphere system of pebble bed HTGR, a novel non-mechanical feeder for plug formation of coarse particles has been proposed in our previous work. We further investigate the pressure fluctuation instability in the vertical plug formation of coarse particles with the non-mechanical feeder. Experiments for plug formation are conducted with glass beads of three kinds of particle diameter (dp = 6, 4, and 2 mm). The results show that micro-scale instabilities along with macro-scale instabilities are observed for the pressure fluctuations of feeder gas inlet in the vertical plug formation for the three particle diameters. It is interesting to find that the micro-scale instabilities decrease first and then increase with superficial gas velocity increasing for dp = 6 and 4 mm glass beads, respectively. The present study provides a further understanding of the pressure fluctuation instabilities in vertical plug formation of coarse particles with the non-mechanical feeder, which can contribute for on-line monitoring and operation optimization of dense-phase gas–solid flows with coarse particles.

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Acknowledgements

The financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51506113), the National S&T Major Project (Grant No. ZX069), and the Key Laboratory of Advanced Reactor Engineering and Safety, Ministry of Education (No. ARES-2019-08) are gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. He Zhang

    Present address: Present address: Science and Technology on Reactor System Design Technology Laboratory, Nuclear Power Institute of China, Chengdu, 610213, China

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Advanced Reactor Engineering and Safety of Ministry of Education, Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Collaborative Innovation Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Xingzhong Diao, He Yan, Tianjin Li, He Zhang & Hanliang Bo

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  1. Xingzhong Diao
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  2. He Yan
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Correspondence to Tianjin Li.

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Diao, X., Yan, H., Li, T. et al. Pressure fluctuation instability in vertical plug formation of coarse particles with a non-mechanical feeder. Exp. Comput. Multiph. Flow 2, 79–88 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42757-019-0028-8

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