Measurement of flow parameters in solid–liquid slugging fluidised beds

Impedance measurements have been applied to solid–liquid suspensions in order to infer the liquid and solid phase distributions in a fluidised slugging bed. The bed is constituted by soda spheres with a particle to column diameter ratio equal to 0.125. The instantaneous liquid fraction has been measured and used to obtain the average solid concentrations inside the different regions along the slug. The signal provided by the impedance probes is processed in terms of probability density functions. The local values of the liquid hold-up can thus be inferred. This study demonstrates the reliability of the presented approach and provides information on solid concentrations in the dense and lean regions of square-nose slugging suspensions.