Starting Mfix from terminal and error (Mfix stopped)

MFiX
#1

Hello,

While running Mfix from terminal. I used following commands:
conda activate fix-22.3
mfix

Previously, Mfix was smoothly with those commands. But I am getting the following in terminal:

qt.qpa.fonts: Populating font family aliases took 217 ms. Replace uses of missing font family “Courier” with one that exists to avoid this cost.

Also, I get a error during the simulation and the program stops. I have attached the screenshot of the error for your reference.

Screen Shot 2023-01-12 at 10.48.55 AM
Screen Shot 2023-01-12 at 10.48.55 AM1920×1080 146 KB

I would be grateful if somebody help me understand why it is happening.
Thank you very much.

Sincerely,
Bimal Chhushyabaga

#2

Hi. As discussed previously, the message about fonts is not important - this is occurring because you are on a Mac and one of the fonts MFiX is expecting is not present. We will fix this in a future release but for now please ignore it, it has nothing to do with the program crash.

The reason for the failure is a combination of SMS mode and custom keywords. The meshing run uses the “default” MFiX solver and that does not know about the project-specific keywords (defined in UDFs) like READ_KF

What is supposed to happen in this case is that a copy of the project file is created, with UDF keywords stripped out, and this is used for the meshing. For some reason, this is not working correctly, resulting in the error you are seeing.

I will investigate the problem and we will fix this in a future release. For the moment, I suggest you disable SMS mode (Settings in the main MFiX menu) and use a custom solver, then this case should run OK.

Thanks for the report, and thanks for your interest in MFiX.

– Charles

#3

@BimalChhushyabaga - I have a question. Is this error occuring when you click “Generate mesh” or after you have accepted the mesh and you click the “Run” (play) button at the top? If you are doing “Run”, have you built and selected the custom solver?

#4

Hi @cgw,

At first I ran it in SMS mode. For this I used “Generate Mesh”, accepted it and then ran it using play button.
After your suggestion, I am trying to run it in custom mode with custom solver.

For this, I have been working with user defined function and custom solver. Could you please suggest me with some references/tutorials of using user defined functions and custom solver?

Sincerely,
Bimal Chhushyabaga

#5

Ok, if I’m understanding you correctly. the meshing worked.

When you hit the “Play” button the run popup appears, you should have seen a warning like this:
shot-2023-01-12_16-37-06

Did you see such a warning?

The custom solver is covered in the documentation here: 5.1. Building Custom Interactive Solver — MFiX 22.4 documentation

#6

Hi @cgw,
Yes, I did get that message. I selected yes option.

Also, Thank you very much for the link of the document.

Sincerely,
Bimal Chhushyabaga.