Simulations of amphiphilic fluids using mesoscale lattice-Boltzmann and lattice-gas methods

TL;DR

This paper compares two mesoscale models for simulating amphiphilic fluids, focusing on their algorithms, stability, parallel performance, visualization, and potential future improvements.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of lattice-Boltzmann and lattice-gas models for amphiphilic fluids, including implementation, performance, and visualization techniques.

Findings

Both models are suitable for large-scale parallel simulations.

Parallelization strategies differ and impact performance.

Visualization and computational steering enhance data interpretation.

Abstract

We compare two recently developed mesoscale models of binary immiscible and ternary amphiphilic fluids. We describe and compare the algorithms in detail and discuss their stability properties. The simulation results for the cases of self-assembly of ternary droplet phases and binary water-amphiphile sponge phases are compared and discussed. Both models require parallel implementation and deployment on large scale parallel computing resources in order to achieve reasonable simulation times for three-dimensional models. The parallelisation strategies and performance on two distinct parallel architectures are compared and discussed. Large scale three dimensional simulations of multiphase fluids requires the extensive use of high performance visualisation techniques in order to enable the large quantities of complex data to be interpreted. We report on our experiences with two commercial visualisation products: AVS and VTK. We also discuss the application and use of novel computational steering techniques for the more efficient utilisation of high performance computing resources. We close the paper with some suggestions for the future development of both models.