CAN DETERMINISTIC CHAOS CREATE ORDER IN FLUIDIZED-BED SCALE-UP

A characteristic property of a dynamic system is how fast it generates information in time. The information connected to a dynamic system is expressed in bits, it is a profound primitive concept and, therefore, cannot be defined as a combination of elemental constituents. The rate of generation of information in a dynamic system is measured by the Kolmogorov entropy in bits per second. This measure can be computed from a time series of one of the independent variables of the dynamic system; in the case of a fluidized bed, this may, for example, be pressure or voidage. The entropy is finite and positive in the case of a deterministic chaotic system, as, for example, a gas-solids fluidized bed. This means that, besides the laws of conservation of mass, energy and momentum, in dimensionless scaling of fluidized-bed reactors, the law of conservation of information should be also taken into account. This implies that two fluidized-bed reactors that are properly scaled will exhibit the same non-dimensional rate of information loss, expressed as Kd(p)/U0. This entropy measure should, therefore, be used to assess the dynamic similarity of scaled fluidized-bed reactors.