Ultrafast X-ray computed tomography of gas-solid fluidized beds

Gas-solid fluidized beds find various applications in chemical and process engineering, for instance in fluid catalytic cracking, drying of particulate solids or polyolefin production. The gas-particle flow in fluidized beds is generally complex and difficult to observe, but exact information on voidage distribution and solid transport is urgently needed for assessment, monitoring, modelling and optimization of fluidized bed operation.
Only few of the currently available flow measurement techniques are applicable to dense fluidized beds. Optical imaging and laser-based methods are at the most merely able to capture the peripheral structure of the solids phase or to provide local information by using probes. For tomographic techniques, such as electrical capacitance tomography (ECT), positron emission tomography (PET) or common X-ray CT, it is in general difficult to provide high spatial and high temporal resolution at the same time.
We here introduce a much faster X-ray tomography approach which is based on electron beam scanning. There, an electron beam is rapidly swept along a circular target to produce a moving X-ray source. A static detector ring with 240 detector elements synchronously captures the radiation intensity. From the resulting radiographic projections of the object of interest non-superimposed cross-sectional density distributions are reconstructed. Beside its really fast scanning capability other advantages of this approach are the use of a single electron beam generator and the high versatility of the electron beam with respect to scan patterns and scanning speed. With our approach we have already demonstrated multiphase flow imaging with frame rates of up to 10.000 fps and a spatial resolution in the range of better than 1 mm.
The results presented here include studies at a bubbly fluidized bed with monodisperse spherical particles, in which the capability of the method to visualize the particle dynamics and the internal structure of the fluidized bed in very detail are demonstrated.