Fluidized bed drying are very well known to yield high heat and mass transfer and hence adopted to many industrial drying processes particularly agricultural products. In this paper, recent advances in fluidized bed drying were reviewed and focus is given to the drying related to the usage of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). It can be seen that usage of modern computational tools such as CFD helps to optimize the fluidized bed dryer design and operation for lower energy consumption and thus better thermal efficiency. Among agricultural products that were reviewed in this paper were oil palm frond, wheat grains, olive pomace, coconut, pepper corn and millet.

The use of solar thermal technologies has shown great prospects towards solar energy conversion into more useful forms of energy and has increasingly expanded solar thermal technology applications. However, the inability to properly store the excess solar energies during peak hours and demands have limited many of their applications. The integration of thermal energy storage (TES) systems with thermal technologies have increased the solar thermal technology performance but the poor thermal characteristics exhibited by phase change materials (PCM) limited the system overall performance. The enhancement of PCM properties by nonadditive have shown increased material performance in TES application and thereby extending the use of solar thermal technology application. Given this narrative and identifies literature gaps, the present study investigated experimentally the enhancement of paraffin PCM using nonadditive metallic of different types and concentrations and analysed their thermal behaviours. The results showed that Cu/paraffin PCM nanocomposites had good thermal reliability in proposed applications even after 150 thermal cycles under different temperatures. Moreover, thermal conductivity was improved significantly as an enhancement of 39% was reported when adding 2.5% of Cu nanoparticles. While specific heat and thermal diffusivity has been enhanced by 16% and 9%, respectively compared to pure paraffin. The obtained results were compared with different theoretical models such as Maxwell mode, Hamilton Crossover model, Jeffery model, and Bruggeman model. The calculated values show a good agreement with experimental ones. As a result, the prepared Cu/Paraffin nanocomposite PCM shows significant promise in thermal energy storage application due to its favourable phase change temperature, comparatively large latent heat, enhanced thermal conductivity and high thermal reliability and conversion. The proposed nanocomposite PCM can be used in many applications such as building materials to reduce interior temperature swings, enhance thermal comfort, and conserve electricity consumption.

This paper presents computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies to characterize air velocity distribution for various bed configurations in a swirling fluidized bed (SFB). Unlike conventional fluidized beds, a SFB provides radial mixing which is desirable is fluidization. Three velocities components were observed, the tangential velocity, radial velocity and axial velocity. These velocities were created as a result of using annular blade type distributor which mimics the turbine blades. In actual industrial applications, the axial velocity will create fluidization while the tangential velocity provides swirling effect. The presence of radial velocity can be explained as a consequence of centrifugal force generated by the swirling gas. Understanding these velocity distributions will enable optimization of the annular blade distributor design towards a high efficient fluidized bed system.