Graphics processing unit accelerated lattice Boltzmann method simulations of dilute gravity currents

TL;DR

This paper presents GPU-accelerated lattice Boltzmann models for simulating dilute gravity currents, achieving high accuracy and significantly reduced computation times, enabling detailed environmental flow studies.

Contribution

The study introduces GPU-accelerated 3D lattice Boltzmann models for dilute gravity currents that match experimental accuracy and are two orders of magnitude faster than traditional methods.

Findings

Achieved accurate simulations validated against experiments.

Reduced computational time by two orders of magnitude.

Enabled high Reynolds number flow modeling.

Abstract

Lattice Boltzmann method models offer a novel framework for the simulation of high Reynolds number dilute gravity currents. The numerical algorithm is well suited to acceleration via implementation on massively parallel computer architectures. Here we present two lattice Boltzmann method models of lock-exchange dilute gravity currents, in which the largest turbulent length scales are directly resolved. The three-dimensional simulations are accelerated by exporting computations to a graphics processing unit and are validated against experiments and high-resolution simulations for Reynolds numbers up to 30,000. The lattice Boltzmann method models achieve equivalent accuracy to conventional large eddy simulation models in the prediction of key flow properties. A conservative analysis of computational performance relative to conventional methods indicates that the presented framework reduces simulation times by two orders of magnitude. Therefore, it can be used as a foundation for the development of depth-resolving models that capture more of the complexity of environmental gravity currents.