Mavis: Seeing the Inner Flame

During the past year, PSC scientific-visualization specialist Kent Eschenberg collaborated with NETL researchers to develop software for interactive 3D visualization. The program, called Mavis, operates with NETL data sets produced by a powerful simulation technology called MFIX (Multiphase Flow with Interphase Exchanges). Developed over years of research, MFIX realistically models the complex processes — gas and particle dynamics, chemical reactions and heat transfer — involved in combustion.

Detailed understanding of combustion lies at the heart of NETL’s research objective: environmentally clean, affordable power from fossil fuel. Mavis provides a quick, effective way to see and comprehend the results from computational study of these processes.

This frame from a Mavis visualization represents “bubble coalescence” in a fluidized-bed reactor, a combustion process in which air is injected from below at high speed into a bed of particles. The particles collectively behave like fluid and, among other fluid-like effects, form bubbles, which affect heat distribution. In this simulation, two jets of different velocity are injected into the bed. Larger bubbles formed above the faster jet (left) attract bubbles formed from the slower jet.