Validation of the GPU-Accelerated CFD Solver ELBE for Free Surface Flow Problems in Civil and Environmental Engineering

Abstract

This contribution is dedicated to demonstrating the high potential and manifold applications of state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools for free-surface flows in civil and environmental engineering.All simulations were performed with the academic research code ELBE (efficient lattice boltzmann environment, http://www.tuhh.de/elbe). The ELBE code follows the supercomputing-on-the-desktop paradigm and is especially designed for local supercomputing, without tedious accesses to supercomputers. ELBE uses graphics processing units (GPU) to accelerate the computations and can be used in a single GPU-equipped workstation of, e.g., a design engineer. The code has been successfully validated in very different fields, mostly related to naval architecture and mechanical engineering. In this contribution, we give an overview of past and present applications with practical relevance for civil engineers. The presented applications are grouped into three major categories: (i) tsunami simulations, considering wave propagation, wave runup, inundation and debris flows; (ii) dam break simulations; and (iii) numerical wave tanks for the calculation of hydrodynamic loads on fixed and moving bodies. This broad range of applications in combination with accurate numerical results and very competitive times to solution demonstrates that modern CFD tools in general, and the ELBE code in particular, can be a helpful design tool for civil and environmental engineers.

Actuator Line Simulations of Wind Turbine Wakes Using the Lattice Boltzmann Method

“…The LBM simulations are performed using the GPU-accelerated Efficient Lattice Boltzmann Environment ELBE 1 (Janßen et al, 2015) mainly developed at Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH). The toolkit comprises various collision models, allows for free-surface modelling (Janßen et al, 2017) as well as efficient geometry mapping (Mierke et al, 2018).…”

Using an Interactive Lattice Boltzmann Solver in Fluid Mechanics Instruction

“…He also contributed to a couple of papers already [25,26,30,35]. Moreover, he won the "Best GPU-related talk" award at the 13th International Conference for Mesoscopic Methods in Engineering and Science (ICMMES 2016, 18-22 July, Hamburg, Germany) and was awarded a recent NVIDIA GPU.…”

“…Even though he is not part of the ELBE team anymore, he's occasionally using ELBE for gaining additional fluid mechanical insight for his current research project, or for demonstration purposes. Moreover, he published his work for the above-mentioned research project in three different journal publications [30,42,43]. On top, he presented the results in front of a large audience at an international conference.…”

“…Several applications related to ocean engineering were also addressed, e.g., wave propagation and wave run-up [27], steady streaming in boundary layers of progressive waves [31] and air-sea interaction and sea spray generation [32][33][34]. An efficient on-device grid generator serves to map complex geometries to the computational grid [30] and was recently extended to second-order accuracy [35].…”

“…The code permits simulations on O(10,000) CUDA cores on multiple GPUs in a shared memory system. The code was carefully validated, e.g., for sloshing and slamming, wave run-up [27], internal floodwater dynamics in partly filled tanks [28] and for three-dimensional free-surface flows with fluid-structure interactions [29,30]. Several applications related to ocean engineering were also addressed, e.g., wave propagation and wave run-up [27], steady streaming in boundary layers of progressive waves [31] and air-sea interaction and sea spray generation [32][33][34].…”