Development of a Flow Solver with Complex Kinetics on the Graphic Processing Units

Abstract

The current paper reports on the implementation of a numerical solver on the Graphic Processing Units (GPU) to model reactive gas mixture with detailed chemical kinetics. The solver incorporates high-order finite volume methods for solving the fluid dynamical equations coupled with stiff source terms. The chemical kinetics are solved implicitly via an operatorsplitting method. We explored different approaches in implementing a fast kinetics solver on the GPU. The detail of the implementation is discussed in the paper. The solver is tested with two high-order shock capturing schemes: MP5 [11] and ADERWENO [12]. Considering only the fluid dynamics calculation, the speed-up factors obtained are 30 for the MP5 scheme and 55 for ADERWENO scheme. For the fully-coupled solver, the performance gain depended on the size of the reaction mechanism. Two different examples of chemistry were explored. The first mechanism consisted of 9 species and 38 reactions, resulting in a speed-up factor up to 35. The second, larger mechanism consisted of 36 species and 308 reactions, resulting in a speed-up factor of up to 40.