Construction of Porous Networks Subjected to Geometric Restrictions by Using OpenMP

Abstract

The study of porous materials involves great importance for a vast number of industrial applications. In order to study some specific characteristics of materials, in-silico simulations can be employed. The particular simulation of pore networks described in this work finds its basis in the Dual Site-Bond Model (DSBM). Under this approach, a porous material is thought to be made of sites (cavities, bulges) interconnected to each other through bonds (throats, capillaries), while every site is connected to a number of bonds each bond is the link between two sites. At present, several computing algorithms have been implemented for the simulation of pore networks, nevertheless, only a few of these methods take into account the geometric restrictions that arise during the interconnection of a set of bonds to every site of the network. It is likely that introducing restrictions of this sort in the computing algorithms would lead to the implementation of more realistic pore networks. In this work, a sequential algorithm and its parallel computing version are proposed to construct pore networks, allowing geometrical restrictions among hollow entities. Our parallel approach uses OpenMP to create a set of threads (computing tasks) that work simultaneously on independent and random pore network regions. We discuss the obtained results.