Simulations of multiphase reactive flows in fluidized beds using in situ adaptive tabulation

A novel algorithm, in situ adaptive tabulation (ISAT), has been implemented into a multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code to treat complex chemistry calculations. In this work, isothermal silane pyrolysis in a fluidized bed reactor is presented to test the feasibility and explore the capabilities of ISAT with a finite-volume two-fluid code (MFIX). Based on the results of simulations, an error tolerance of 10^-5 is found to be satisfactory for maintaining the accuracy for the examples investigated. Due to the rapidly changing time step used in the CFD code, the performance enhancement was found initially to be minimal. However, the performance is significantly improved when ISAT is called using a fixed time step.