I am a new learner of MFIX. And recently I have tried to run those DEM tutorials cases with mfix-23.2. However it seems that there is a problem with my Build solver. For example, rotating drum case, I just simply click the Build solver button, and it was like this:
then, I have tested it with several versions of mfix and found out that it works with mfix-20.1.2. Then I enabled the energy equation of this case, set the wall boudary condition to 600K. And built solver again. It can run, but only with these red errors, no result. I couldn’t understand why. If anybody knows why, I would appreciate it.
I didn’t make it quite clearly, I’ve got two main questions here:
Why couldn’t I use other version of mfix to run this tutorial case? Actually not just this case, I have tried other case, it’s the same problem. How could I know which version is compatible to one tutorial case?
Even if I could run this rotating drum case with mfix-23.2, it seems that I still can’t enable energy equation with it. I don’t know why. I just want to test a simple case which wall rotate and keep a constant temperature.
All tutorials should be compatible with all versions of MFiX, although some small adjustments migh be necessary due to deprecated keywords, etc.
This may be an issue with the Chinese characters in the file name - in a perfect world, this would work fine but ours is sadly not. Can you try again with rotating_drum3 - 副本 renamed to rotating drum ?
That said - I ran this case with 23.3 on Linux and there were no problems. But I see you are on Windows so there may be a problem there. I will test on Wndows when I get a chance but I do not have access to my Windows machine at the moment.
These Chinese characters appeared when I tried to copy it to post here. Actually in my case, it ran with “rotating_drum”. But this gave me a thought that my problem probably is caused by inappropriate file routine or the system name. Then I found out that my system name is Chinese characters . So I tried to run this case on my Linux, it actually worked.
Next, I’ll figure out how to change my system name to English so as to check if this is caused by the Chinese system name. However it seems that I need to reinstall my system to totally change my system name , I’ll see if there is any other way to change since I have got a lot of other softwares. So, if you get a chance to test on your window system, please let me know your test result. It would be really helpful.
MFiX has been around for a while and when development on it started, Unicode did not exist. It would be great if everything worked perfectly with non-ASCII characters in host names, file names, spaces in file names, etc. I fix issues as they come up but this has never been a high priority for our development team. The GUI portions are written in Python which has good support for Unicode but the backend solver is in Fortran which does not. And these two components need to talk to each other. Plenty of places for things to go wrong. I don’t think anyone even considered putting non-ASCII characters into a host name!
Also note that you can easily change a Windows host name, no reinstallation is required, just a restart. Go to “System/About” in the Windows menu.
Sorry for the trouble. Your reports are helpful to us and we will try to improve support for Unicode characters in the next version of MFiX.
, cgw.
. So I tried to run this case on my Linux, it actually worked.
, I’ll see if there is any other way to change since I have got a lot of other softwares. So, if you get a chance to test on your window system, please let me know your test result. It would be really helpful.