In the 1990s Raychem Corporation established a program to investigate the commercialization of several promising applications involving the combined use of its core competencies in materials science, radiation chemistry and e-beam radiation technology. The applications investigated included those that would extend Raychem’s well known heat recoverable polymer and wire and cable product lines as well as new potential applications such as remediation of contaminated aqueous streams. A central part of the program was the development of new accelerator technology designed to improve quality, lower processing costs and efficiently process conformable materials such at liquids. A major emphasis with this new irradiation technology was to look at the accelerator and product handling systems as one integrated, not as two complimentary systems.

Digital Image Analysis techniques, a phenomenological Counter-Current Back-Mixing model (CCBM) and Two-Fluid Model (TFM) simulations were employed to evaluate the effect of scale on the Two-Section Two-Zone Fluidized Bed Reactors (TS-TZFBR) fluid dynamics, i.e. bubble characteristics, axial mixing of solids and defluidization phenomena. The reactor scaling did not affect the quality of the TFM bubble size predictions. A bubble size correlation previously proposed by the authors for TS-TZFBR units was able to predict the experimental axial bubble size evolution at the different reactor scales and gas velocities (ugas/umf=1.5–3.0) with a relative error under 17%. The TFM simulated axial solid mass fluxes were same order as these obtained by Particle Image Velocimetry for every reactor size. However, the classical CCBM model was unable to predict the effect of scale on the solids axial mixing in a TS-TZFBR. The inclination angle of the defluidized bed regions found within the TS-TZFBR tapered zone, β, increased by (ugas/umf)0.25 when duplicating the reactor size. Nevertheless, it did not exceed the prescribed upper limit of β=80° for any of the conditions tested.