On the Applicability of the Coarse Grained Coupled CFD-DEM Model to Predict the Heat Transfer During the Fluidized Bed Drying of Pharmaceutical Granules

Fluidized bed dryer often used in the pharmaceutical industry for drying of wet granules. Coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – discrete element method (DEM) is frequently used to model the drying process because of its ability to obtain the relevant information at the particle level. However, it becomes almost impossible to model the industrial scale fluidized bed dryer using the coupled CFD-DEM method because of the presence of large number of particles (∼10^6-8) . To reduce the number of particles to be tracked in the simulation, coarse grained coupled CFD-DEM method was developed by researchers where a certain number of particles of the original system was represented by a relatively bigger particle in the coarse-grained system. The appropriate scaling of the particle–particle and particle–fluid interaction forces is necessary to make sure that the dynamics of the coarse-grained particles/parcels accurately represent the dynamics of the original particles. The coarse-graining of the drying process of pharmaceutical granules during fluidization needs systematic coarse-graining of the momentum, heat, and solvent vapor transfer process. A coarse grained coupled CFD-DEM method was used to model the momentum and heat transfer during the fluidization of pharmaceutical granules. It was shown that the heat transfer during the fluidization of large number of particles could be predicted by simulating a smaller number of bigger particles with appropriate scaling of particle–particle heat and momentum transfer, and particle–fluid heat and momentum transfer at significantly smaller computational time. This model can be further extended by including a coarse-grained moisture transport model in future.