Drag coefficient is of crucial importance for the simulation of heterogeneous gas-solid two-phase flow with the two-fluid model. However
the correlations in literature are based on the average method
and therefore not suitable for simulating the heterogeneous flow structure in fast fluidization. This paper is devoted to shedding some light on the effect of heterogeneous flow structure on drag coefficient. A new approach based on the modified energy-minimization multi-scale model is presented to calculate the drag coefficient in a control volume of computational fluid dynamics. The results indicate that the drag coefficient is much lower than that calculated from correlations based on average method
therefore showing reasonable agreement with the conclusion from experimental results.