Cm. Vandenbleek et Jc. Schouten, CAN DETERMINISTIC CHAOS CREATE ORDER IN FLUIDIZED-BED SCALE-UP, Chemical Engineering Science, 48(13), 1993, pp. 2367-2373
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.