Hello Friends,

I am going to simulate a liquid-gas-solid three phase system where some chemical reactions are occuring, could anyone please tell me which software is more suitable between Fluent and CFX? Many thanks.

Congli

Hi there

You are very brave to attempt CFD of liquid-gas-solid three phase systems, with chemical reactions. This is an area of active research.

Any of the 2 codes (and many others) will give you what you reasonable results, but you will need much experience with the code itself and solid knowledge of all the physics. It will be more important to evaluate the cost of good support/guidance, and you might consider using a consultant to get the job done.

Well I don't know about CFX but you'll have problems doing this in Fluent with any ease!

You might get this working in the old Fluent 4 if you write user code for the interphase chemical reactions. Homogeneneous reactions don't need user code.

The current Fluent 6 version can't model heat transfer or chemical reactions with dense phase solids (granular model). That should be coming soon - but how good? who knows!? So you'd have to use the langrangian methods for chemical reactions etc. which may not be suitable.

You'll need to be careful with all this stuff - even if the models exist they may not work too well together.

The older structured codes seem to have more physics than the new unstructured versions and even though the new ones have lots of other features (for geometry and paralleizaton etc) in many cases the older codes are more reliable, they are just a lot slower.

Greg