Next-Generation Multiphase Flow Solver For Fluidized Bed Applications

A framework is developed to integrate MFiX (Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchanges) with advanced linear solvers in Trilinos. MFiX is a widely used open source general purpose multiphase solver developed by National Energy Technology Laboratories and written in Fortran. Trilinos is an objected oriented open source software development platform from Sandia National Laboratories for solving large scale multiphysics problems. The framework handles the different data structures in Fortran and C++ and exchanges the information from MFiX to Trilinos and vice versa. The integrated solver, called MFiX-Trilinos hereafter, provides next-generation computational capabilities including scalable linear solvers for distributed memory massively parallel computers. In this paper, the solution from the standard linear solvers in MFiX-Trilinos is validated against the same from MFiX for 2D and 3D fluidized bed problems. The standard iterative solvers considered in this work are Bi-Conjugate Gradient Stabilized (BiCGStab) and Generalized minimal residual methods (GMRES) as the matrix is non-symmetric in nature. The stopping criterion set for the iterative solvers is same. It is observed that the solution from the integrated solver and MFiX is in good agreement.