3.4.1. Use of changing air flowrates and the role of air distributor plates in scale-up
Typical air distributors for fluidized bed coaters containing draft tubes are illustrated in Fig. 1(A). The center of the plate generally contains relatively large holes while the region under the annular packed bed contains much smaller holes. This pattern promotes a large volume of airflow through the draft tube and hence causes the upward transport of bed solids in the center. Recent work by Ho et al. [9] has shown that the air flow rates through both the annular (outer) and draft tube (inner) regions of the bed are critical to the coating process. In their work, small beads (641 μm in diameter) were coated to produce much larger beads (1191 μm in diameter) that weighed approximately six times that of the uncoated starting material. Because of the large increase in mass, the fluidizing air had to be increased by a factor of 1.6 during the process. Although the circulation rate of solids is, in general, governed by the airflow through the insert, the undesired agglomeration of solids was controlled by the airflow through the annulus and it was necessary to have a bubbling bed in the annular region to avoid (minimize) agglomeration. For their study, Ho et al. [9] showed that scale-up was possible by using identical distributor plates (having the same ratio of open areas for the insert and annular regions) and adjusting the air flow so that the ratios of Ui/Ut and Uo/Ut were held constant throughout the run.
Therefore, when scaling up equipment, the air velocity through both the draft tube and the annular region should be kept constant. When the scale-up involves an increase in the number of draft tubes, the scale-up factor should be based on the ratio of total open area of the distributor plate and is given by the Eq. (3):