Efficient computation of particle-fluid and particle-particle interactions in compressible flow

Abstract

Particle collisions are the primary mechanism of inter-particle momentum and energy exchange for dense particle-laden flow. Accurate approximation of this collision operator in four-way coupled Euler–Lagrange approaches remains challenging due to the associated computational cost. Adopting a deterministic collision model and a hard-sphere (binary collision) approach eases time step constraints but imposes non-locality on distributed memory architectures, necessitating the inclusion of collision partners from each grid element in the vicinity. Retaining high-order accuracy and parallel efficiency also ties into the correct and compact treatment of the particle-fluid coupling, where adequate kernels are required to effectively project the momentum and thermal energy exchange terms of the particles to the Eulerian grid. In this work, we present an efficient particle collision and projection operator based on an MPI+MPI hybrid approach to enable time-resolved and high-order accurate simulations of compressible, four-way coupled particle-laden flows at dense concentrations. A distinct feature of the proposed particle collision algorithm is the efficient calculation of exact binary inter-particle collisions on arbitrary core counts by facilitating intranode data exchange through direct load/store operations and internode communication using one-sided communication. Combining the particle operator with a hybrid discretization operator based on a high-order discontinuous Galerkin method and a localized low-order finite volume operator allows an accurate treatment of highly compressible particle-laden flows. The approach is extensively validated against a range of benchmark problems. Contrary to literature, the scaling properties are demonstrated on state-of-the-art high performance computing systems, encompassing one-way to four-way coupled simulations. Finally, the proposed algorithm is compatible with unstructured, curved high-order grids which permits the handling of complex geometries as is emphasized by application of the framework to large-scale application cases.