Madhava Syamlal
Chris Guenther
Thomas J. O’Brien
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Madhava Syamlal |
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MFIX: A Parallel Multiphase CFD Code for Modeling Coal Gasification Over the past decade, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has developed an open-source code for the simulation of heavily-loaded, reactive gas/particle flows, Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchange (MFIX). The programmatic purpose of this development has been to model multiphase flow processes in the power and process industry (e.g., coal gasifiers) to help the development of next generation power plants (e.g., DOE’s FutureGen project). MFIX has been used to develop and validate multiphase flow theory (transport equations and constitutive relations) and to develop numerical techniques for solving these equations efficiently and accurately. It has been downloaded from the web site www.mfix.org by over 500 scientists from around the world. This poster will show the current status of MFIX software, an illustration of its application to model an industrial scale gasifier and provide information on the plans being developed for the next generation MFIX. MFIX was used to conduct transient three dimensional simulations of an industrial scale Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) Transport Gasifier in operation at the Power Systems Development Facility (PSDF) in Wilsonville, Alabama. MFIX was used to calculate time dependent information of pressure, temperature, composition, void fraction, and velocity distribution inside the gasifier. The chemistry model in MFIX uses global reaction rates to account for devolitization, tar cracking, water-gas shift reaction, gasification and combustion. The gas phase consists of eight species: O2 , CO, CO2 , CH4 , H2 , H2O, N2 , and tar; and the solids phase consists of four species: carbon, volatile matter, ash, and moisture. Simulation results of a western sub-bituminous and a western bituminous coal show excellent agreement with experimental data. Currently the MFIX group is developing a “next generation” version of this open-source code. The intended application domain of the code is for dilute to dense gas-solid flows with chemical reactions and heat transfer, including radiation. It will incorporate both Eulerian-Eulerian and Eulerian-Lagrangian representations of particle motion and operate within a framework to achieve scalable performance on large scale parallel computing platforms. It will be composed of best-in-class software components developed at national laboratories, universities and other open-source software organizations. It will include a scripting-front end that would enable scientists and engineers to focus on model and algorithm development and validation, rather than on code development and debugging, thereby providing a substantially new research capability for computational multiphase flow.
National Energy Technology Laboratory |