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 rat e of generation of information in a dynamic system is measured by the Kolmogorov entropy in bits per second. This measure can be computed fr om a time series of one of the independent variables of the dynamic sy stem; in the case of a fluidized bed, this may, for example, be pressu re or voidage. The entropy is finite and positive in the case of a det erministic chaotic system, as, for example, a gas-solids fluidized bed . This means that, besides the laws of conservation of mass, energy an d momentum, in dimensionless scaling of fluidized-bed reactors, the la w of conservation of information should be also taken into account. Th is implies that two fluidized-bed reactors that are properly scaled wi ll exhibit the same non-dimensional rate of information loss, expresse d as Kd(p)/U0. This entropy measure should, therefore, be used to asse ss the dynamic similarity of scaled fluidized-bed reactors.