A scalable parallel algorithm for the direct numerical simulation of three-dimensional incompressible particulate flow

  • Authors:

  • Shi Jin;Peter Minev;Krishnaswamy Nandakumar

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada;Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada;Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada,Chemical Engineering Program, The Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Particulate flow is of great importance from both the scientific and engineering points of view. Owing to the complexity of particle-flow interactions, direct numerical simulations (DNS) of inertial particulate flow with finite-size particles have been limited to a very small number of particles, while the industrial applications involve larger numbers with many orders of magnitude. This article presents a parallel implementation of a fictitious domain method for the DNS of particulate flows. The method is thoroughly tested and its parallel performance on distributed memory clusters is evaluated on a large-scale problem. Finally, we present the results for the separation of 21,336 particles of two different densities in a viscous fluid. Although there is still a significant gap between DNS and the industrial applications, the present algorithm allows to simulate significantly large number of particles so that a meaningful statistical analysis can be performed. This will help in the development of new closure relations for the averaged models of multiphase flows.