Multiscale probability distribution of pressure fluctuations in fluidized beds

Analysis of flow in fluidized beds, a common chemical reactor, is of much current interest due to its fundamental as well as industrial importance. Experimental data for the successive increments of the pressure fluctuations time series in a fluidized bed are analyzed by computing a multiscale probability density function (PDF) of the increments. The results demonstrate the evolution of the shape of the PDF from the short to long time scales. The deformation of the PDF across time scales may be modeled by the log-normal cascade model. The results are also in contrast to the previously proposed PDFs for the pressure fluctuations that include a Gaussian distribution and a PDF with a power-law tail. To understand better the properties of the pressure fluctuations, we also construct the shuffled and surrogate time series for the data and analyze them with the same method. It turns out that long-range correlations play an important role in the structure of the time series that represent the pressure fluctuation.