Path and wake of cylinders falling in a liquid at rest or in a bubble swarm towards the hydrodynamical modeling of ebullated bed reactors

We study the free fall of  a solid cylinder in two different configurations. First, we investigate experimentally the free fall of a solid cylinder in a fluid at rest. The sensitivity to two dimensionless parameters, the Archimedes number (Ar) and the aspect ratio of the cylinder (L/d) is examined. Experiments are conducted with two orthogonal cameras, and advanced image processing techniques are developed in order to measure the position and orientation of the cylinder in 3D. Within the range of parameters studied (200 < Ar < 1100, 2 < L/d < 20), the cylinders adopt different types of falling motion. Two main types of paths are observed, the first one is a rectilinear fall of the cylinder that keeps its axis horizontal, and the second one is a fluttering oscillatory motion. Other more complex types of motion are observed and discussed. The fluttering motion of the cylinder is analyzed in details. On top of the study of the body motion, the cylinder wake is also visualized and characterized.

In a second part, we study the interaction between a freely falling cylinder and a rising swarm of bubbles. This investigation was performed experimentally, in a confined vertical thin-gap cell. Cylinders of various density ratio and elongation ratio are released in a bubble swarm of gas volume fraction between 2% and 5%. The cylinder motion is greatly modified by the bubble swarm. Several mechanisms of interaction between the cylinder and the bubbles are identified (direct contact, interactions with fluid perturbations...), and their effect is characterized. We perform a statistical analysis of the cylinder motion in the swarm, and compare it to results in the confined fluid at rest. The cylinder density ratio and elongation ratio both play an important role in its motion in the bubble swarm. Conditional statistics allow us to further investigate the effect of the contact between the cylinder and a bubble, and of the cylinder orientation in the swarm. Finally, the dispersion of the cylinder motion in the swarm is characterized. A major effect of the bubble swarm is to increase, through bubble-cylinder contacts, the probability of the cylinder to be in nearly vertical orientations. This drastically changes the kinematics of the cylinder as compared to its motion in the fluid at rest.