A dynamic load balancing method for the evaluation of chemical reaction rates in parallel combustion simulations

Abstract

The development and assessment of an efficient parallelization method for the evaluation of reaction rates in combustion simulations is presented. Combustion simulations where the finite-rate chemistry model is employed are computationally expensive. In such simulations, a transport equation for each species in the chemical reaction mechanism has to be solved, and the resulting system of equations is typically stiff. As a result, advanced implicit methods must be applied to obtain accurate solutions using reasonable time-steps at expenses of higher computational resources than explicit or classical implicit methods. In the present work, a new algorithm aimed to enhance the numerical performance of the time integration of stiffsystems of equations in parallel combustion simulations is presented. The algorithm is based on a runtime load balancing mechanism, increasing noteworthy the computational performance of the simulations, and consequently, reducing significantly the computer time required to perform the numerical combustion studies.