The US Department of Energy's Office of Industrial Technology program recently funded the Multiphase Fluid Dynamics Research Consortium, established to advance the state of the art in modeling gas-solid flows. At the kick-off meeting in July, Fluent staff joined representatives from DOE, industry (Chevron, Cray, Dow Chemical, Dow Corning, Du Pont, Exxon, Westinghouse), national laboratories (FETC, Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge) and universities (Clarkson, IIT, Princeton, Purdue, Washington University) to brainstorm about their ideas and research plans.

Under the consortium, experimentalists and CFD experts will work together to advance the state of the art in measurement techniques and to design well-defined experiments to support CFD model development. The focus will be on different aspects of gas-solid flows in risers and fluidized beds.

Fluent and FETC have already initiated work to validate CFD for flow in a riser. The state-of-the-art models in FLUENT 4.5 are being evaluated against experimental measurements collected by FETC, and the study results will be used to focus ongoing CFD model development.

Contours of solids volume fraction (horizontal slices) and pressure (vertical slice) in the FETC experimental riser.

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