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.