Fluidization systems have the potential to be widely used in the power generation, chemical and mineral processing industries. These studies are carried out due to the constraints on conventional fluidization systems, which infers to (i) Several types of distributor design can influence the bubble size and lower down the fluidization performance, (ii) The conventional fluidization systems does not fluidized at one specific value that directly affect in the bed behavior, and (iii) The pressure drop in conventional fluidization is not constant with increasing air velocity, which affects on bed weight or bed moisture content. Therefore, the current study aims to (i) assess the operational range of several plenum chamber configurations and cone height modelled for annular blade distributor application in fluidization systems, (ii) investigate the velocity component on airflow distribution using a selected plenum chamber configuration and cone height, and (iii) evaluate the optimized geometry of plenum chamber configuration and cone height that could overcome the weaknesses associated with current fluidization systems towards uniform velocity distribution, low tangential velocity and high-pressure drop via statistical analysis. To achieve the goal outlined in this study, several methods have been proposed. First, the numerical simulation of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used to investigate the parameters that influence annular plenum chamber depth (0 mm, 100 mm and 200 mm) and various cone heights (150 mm, 200 and 250) through 60 blades number and 15° inclination angle. Second, the CFD is used to investigate the velocity characteristics at each velocity component, such as velocity magnitude, tangential velocity, axial velocity and radial velocity, as well as the pressure drop affected by plenum chamber configuration. This criterion has been evaluated using statistical analysis on the mean value, standard deviation, and Full Factorial Design (FFD) optimization method. The most significant finding in this study representing the optimum design of the SFB system was cone height 200 mm with annular blade distributor depth 100 mm. This is because it has a lower pressure drop (6.89 Pa) and a relatively low standard deviation on the tangential velocity of 3.704%. Furthermore, extended analysis using ANOVA analysis has shown that annular blade distributor depth has a significant parameter on the values of pressure drop. Based on the optimization method of Full Factorial Design (FFD) results, referring to the two factors of annular blade distributor depth and cone height on current fluidization systems, the pressure drop is the most significant parameter that contributed to the less energy consumption on the fluidization systems.
