Open-source development of a gas/particle flow problem solving environment

Over the past decade, the National Energy Technology Center has developed an open-source code for the simulation of heavily-loaded, reactive gas/particle flows, MFIX (Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchange). The programmatic purpose of this development is to model multiphase flow processes in power and process industry, e.g., coal gasifiers, so as to increase the use of modeling for design and control. MFIX is 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. The codes have physical and numerical features. The software design goals are to use the best-in-class software components from different sources; provide a fully functional, minimum set of features that is based completely on public domain software components; allow the use of software components in different languages; use modern software tools and practices such as object oriented design, automated building, testing and generation of documentation; conform to well established interface standards; and use a scripting front end to enable customization. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the AIChE 2004 Annual Meeting (Austin, TX 11/7-12/2004).