Simulating hydraulic transients in ultra-long water (oil, gas) transmission or large-scale distribution systems are time-consuming, and exploring ways to improve the simulation efficiency is an essential research direction. The parallel implementation of the method of characteristics (MOC) on graphics processing unit (GPU) chips is a promising approach for accelerating the simulations, because GPU has a great parallelization ability for massive but simple computations, and the explicit and local features of MOC meet the features of GPU quite well. In this paper, we propose and verify a GPU implementation of MOC on a single chip for more efficient simulations of hydraulic transients. Details of GPU-MOC parallel strategies are introduced, and the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are verified by simulating the benchmark single pipe water hammer problem. The transient processes of a large scale water distribution system and a long-distance water transmission system are simulated to investigate the computing capability of the proposed method. The results show that GPU-MOC method can achieve significant performance gains, and the speedup ratios are up to hundreds compared to the traditional method. This preliminary work demonstrates that GPU-MOC parallel computing has great prospects in practical applications with large computing load.
Simulating shallow water flows in large scale river-lake systems is important but challenging because huge computer resources and time are needed. This paper aimed to propose a simple and efficient 1D–2D coupled model for simulating these flows. The newly developed lattice Boltzmann (LB) method was adopted to simulate 1D and 2D flows, because of its easy implementation, intrinsic parallelism, and high accuracy. The coupling strategy of the 1D–2D interfaces was implemented at the mesoscopic level, in which the unknown distribution functions at the coupling interfaces were calculated by the known distribution functions and the primitive variables from the adjacent 1D and 2D lattice nodes. To verify the numerical accuracy and stability, numerical tests, including dam-break flow and surge waves in the tailrace canal of a hydropower station, were simulated by the proposed model. The results agreed well with both analytical solutions and commercial software results, and second-order convergence was verified. The application of the proposed model in simulating the surge wave propagation and reflection phenomena in a reservoir of a run-of-river hydropower station indicated that it had a huge advantage in simulating flows in large-scale river-lake systems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.