Widely Applicable Lattice Boltzmann from Erlangen

Abstract

Simulations of particulate flows are crucial for the modeling of many natural phenomena and for the optimization of related industrial applications. Sedimentation and fluidization processes are important examples. Many of the currently established simulation methods, for instance molecular dynamics or particle hydrodynamics, do not resolve the particles in the flow, but treat them as point masses without explicitly accounting for individual frictional collisions. In our approach, a 3D lattice Boltzmann fluid simulation and a multibody dynamics simulation are dynamically coupled in order to fully resolve the motion of immersed particles. For a detailed understanding of the physical phenomena within particulate flows, the algorithms will be applied, verified and improved to simulate real world scenarios. Therefor, millions of geometrically modeled objects need to be simulated, resulting in a huge computational and memory demand. All algorithms of the coupled solver are incorporated in a massively parallel software framework, named waLBerla, which shows good scaling results on thousands of cores. It will support the increasing number of processors of current and upcoming supercomputers and the further development of numerical and physical models and of parallel computing environments.