Uncertainty quantification of fluidized beds using a data-driven framework

We carried out a nondeterministic analysis of flow in a fluidized bed. The flow in the fluidized bed is simulated with National Energy Technology Laboratory's open source multiphase fluid dynamics suite MFiX. It does not possess tools for uncertainty quantification. Therefore, we developed a C++ wrapper to integrate an uncertainty quantification toolkit developed at Sandia National Laboratory with MFiX. The wrapper exchanges uncertain input parameters and key output parameters among Dakota and MFiX. However, a data-driven framework is also developed to obtain reliable statistics as it is not feasible to get them with MFiX integrated into Dakota, Dakota-MFiX. The data generated from Dakota-MFiX simulations, with the Latin Hypercube method of sampling size 500, is used to train a machine learning algorithm. The trained and tested deep neural network algorithm is integrated with Dakota via the wrapper to obtain low order statistics of the bed height and pressure drop across the bed. In addition, it can be used to obtain statistics with various distributions of the uncertain input variables and various uncertainty quantification methods. In addition, sensitivity analysis is carried out for 9 input parameters and two output parameters. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.