Conclusion

To reiterate, the experimental study aimed to determine the effect of increasing and
decreasing fluid flow rates on the fluidization patterns of the bed of particles. This was
achieved through the observation and the recording of changes in bed height and pressure
drop over the experiment.
The findings concur with literature on the effect of an increase in flow rate which
increases the pressure drop as well as the bed height. Both gas-solid and liquid-solid
systems also showed the similar trend in decreasing fluid flow rate and a constant value
of pressure drop was achieved until the minimum fluidization velocity, U mf was reached.
The comparison showed that gas-solid fluidization system has lower minimum
fluidization velocity than liquid-solid fluidization system due to the significant
differences in the densities and viscosities of fluid. In addition, the deviance of the
experimentally obtained value of pressure drop in the liquid-solid system was observed
and this may be concluded that the bed of particles was not fully fluidized.
Nonetheless, discrepancies in the experimental findings exist and these sources of errors
should be identified and improvements to the experiment were suggested for greater
accuracy of results.