[chegdan]

To Whom it May Concern,

I am currently a graduate student in the United States in the field of Chemical Engineering. I have been using OpenFOAM in the area of multiphase reaction engineering. I have the opportunity to receive a fellowship to travel abroad and take part in research in Asia, New Zealand, or Australia for a period of ten weeks at no cost to the lab I work in. I was wondering if there were any labs that work with OpenFoam (specifically the multiphase capabilities, mesh motion/refinement, etc.) that would be interested in hosting me for the summer of 2009. There would be no cost to your lab, as it is paid for by the US government. Please let me your contact information.

Dan C.

[smehdi609]

Hi Daniel,
I have a question which has nothing to do with this post ;). Since you are a chemical engineer working in reactor field, you should have definitely heard about MFIX. I was wondering whether OpenFOAM is better for reactor simulations or MFIX. I know that an object oriented package is way better than a software which has been written in Fortran. What I am curious to know is which one is better in terms of physical submodels.

Hope you get a good summer research position.
Cheers,
Mahdi

[chegdan]

Mahdi,

Well, Since I have never personally used MFiX and none of my coworkers do either...I can't really say that OpenFOAM is better overall. I haven't met a great deal of reaction engineering people working with OF (something that I am trying to change where I study). About the submodels. The best part about OF is that if you have the patience, you can program pretty much anything. The way the program is set up is that there are quite a few tutorials set up that use solvers in which the user may alter to fit their needs. Most of the solvers are single physics, meaning its not the combiled heat, mass, and momentum transfer that ChE generally uses. However, it is not too difficult to add these different transport equations. They have several multiphase models, but if you can find it in the literature and are willing to program then you can produce a custom solver to fit your needs entirely.So, I guess what I'm saying is that there aren't submodels too specific to say a fluidized bed, but the programming effort would be minimal and customization and speed of the application is great. If you can find the pde's or ode's then you can program them in with relative ease.

Dan

[nandiganavishal]

Hi Daniel and Mahdi,

I know this is not the apt question in this forum, but I would like to ask you guys a question since both of you are chemical engineers. I would like to know whether you people have solved coupled pde's using direct solvers (not using relaxation techniques)in OpneFoam.

Is it possible to solve them directly in openfoam (I am using OpenFoam verstion 1.5 and fairly new to Openfoam)?

Kindly offer your valuable suggestions.

[smehdi609]

Thank you very much Daniel, nice informations

[chegdan]

Vishal,

Not really sure...I would try searching this site (the message board) some more or posting your own thread somewhere better than this post. good luck, although if I figure it out soon i will post an answer.

Dan

[nandiganavishal]

Thanks for the reply Daniel. No problem.


Vishal