Development of a Discrete Mass Inflow Boundary Condition for MFIX

Jordan Musser, Mary Ann Drumright-Clarke, Janine Galvin

MFIX (Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchanges) is an open source software package developed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) used for modeling the chemical reactions, heat transfer, and hydrodynamics of fluid-solid systems. Currently, the stable publically available release of MFIX does not include a discrete mass inflow boundary condition (DMIBC) for its discrete element method (DEM) package. Inflow boundary conditions are useful for simulating systems where particles are consumed through chemical reactions and an incoming feed is necessary to sustain the reaction. To implement the DMIBC an inlet staging area is designated outside the computational domain and particles are passed through the wall region associated with the inlet. Forces incurred on entering particles, generated from collisions with particles already in the system, are ignored whereas, particles already in the system respond to contact forces and react accordingly, moving away from the inlet. This approach prevents any unphysical overlap between new and existing particles. It also ensures that particles entering the system will enter the computational domain regardless of opposing forces. Once an incoming particle is fully within the domain, it reacts appropriately to any and all contact force. This approach for a DMIBC has been implemented and is available within the current development version of MFIX.

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