Gas-solid beds are ubiquitous in industrial and energy production applications. Examples include fluidized beds, which are used in many systems such as in Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) power plants or in chemical looping systems. These examples and others involve complicated interactions between each phase of reactants in the system. The motivation of this work stems from the need for a better understanding of bed hydrodynamics in existing energy systems; results from this work can be used directly in software such as Fluent to more accurately predict flow behaviors of gas and solid phases. The experimental data are collected from two setups including an optically accessible drag measurement facility that was used to obtain the drag coefficient at various particle Reynolds numbers and a lab-scale gas-solid packed bed which was used to validate the computational model through pressure drop measurements across the packed bed. Results showed that the new correlation presented in this thesis predicted drag with more accuracy when compared to existing models and experiments for particle sphericities up to 0.9. Implementation of the drag relationship into Fluent through a user-defined function was also done using the two-fluid model. The newly developed drag model predicted the pressure drop behavior for non-spherical particles for a wide range of particle sphericities from 0.5 to 0.9 and Reynolds numbers between 1 and 1000.
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