SIMULATION OF THE PROFILE OF LOSS IN CHARGE OF AIR FLOW IN A CHARCOAL FIXED BED

The charcoal demand in Brazilian steel industry has been growing strongly during the last few years. This fact has been motivating charcoal producers to increase their productive system utilization, by reducing its cycle time, mainly, the refrigeration time. In order to optimize the system, it is necessary to find out the gas: velocity, pressure and temperature distribution passing through charcoal medium. These distributions can be obtained by physical experimentation or computational simulation, as computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Computational simulation (CFD) allows to solve, quickly, many engineering problems, even the most complex, with low cost. Thus, this work was made aiming to determinate the static pressure drop profile on fluid flow through a charcoal medium. To perform the simulation, the medium porosity considered was 0.47, the linear loss coefficient was 24 kg m³ s^-1 and the quadratic loss coefficient was 343 kg m^-4. It was found that the pressure drop profile had a behavior very similar to the other models, commonly used in other agricultural products.