MFIX-Exa was used to simulate PSRI's semi-circular fluidized bed with opposing horizontal jets. The bed material is (nominally) 1 mm ceramic beads. The bed is fluidized by the distributor just above incipient fluidization. Additional fluidization is provided by the two lower jets operated at approximately 200 m/s. The jets were modeled in two ways: EB) the jets were resolved with embedded boundaries (EBs) extending to the domain extents and flow) the jets were modeled as flow-on-EB boundary conditions applied on the EB of the bed wall. Two drag laws were considered for each: Wen and Yu (1966) and Syamlal and O'Brien (1987), both of which were calibrated to match minimum fluidization exactly. Ascent in situ visualization is used to capture three images which are rendered into the animations show 1) gas velocity magnitude and 2) volume fraction along a plane centered on the jets, located 10 fluid cells into the bed away from the front wall, and 3) gas velocity magnitude on contours of 85% gas volume fraction, roughly identifying bubble regions within the bed. Each show 5.9 seconds of simulated time after a 2 second initialization period and are played back at 1/4 real time. Of the four, the flow-WenYu case appears to best capture the experimental behavior. The results were presented at the 2022 APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting.

Note: due to a directory not being initialized, the EB-WenYu case is shorter due to missing frames.