Accelerating a Coupled SPH-FEM Solver through Heterogeneous Computing for use in Fluid-Structure Interaction Problems

This work presents a partitioned approach to simulating free-surface flow interaction with hyper-elastic structures in which a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) solver is coupled with a finite-element (FEM) solver. SPH is a mesh-free, Lagrangian numerical technique frequently employed to study physical phenomena involving large deformations, such as fragmentation or breaking waves. As a mesh-free Lagrangian method, SPH makes an attractive alternative to traditional grid-based methods for modeling free-surface flows and/or problems with rapid deformations where frequent re-meshing and additional free-surface tracking algorithms are non-trivial. This work continues and extends the earlier coupled 2D SPH-FEM approach of Yang et al. [1,2] by linking a double-precision GPU implementation of a 3D weakly compressible SPH formulation [3] with the open source finite element software Code_Aster [4]. Using this approach, the fluid domain is evolved on the GPU, while the CPU updates the structural domain. Finally, the partitioned solutions are coupled using a traditional staggered algorithm.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Aerospace Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Gilbert, John Nicholas

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• McCue-Weil, Leigh S.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Xiao, Heng
• Hughes, Owen F.
• Patil, Mayuresh J.

• smoothed particle hydrodynamics
• meshfree CFD
• fluid-structure interaction
• GPU computing

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:5214

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/52924