3D SIMULATION OF FLUID-PARTICLE INTERACTIONS WITH THE NUMBER OF PARTICLES REACHING 100

A high performance computing research tool has been developed for 3D s imulation of fluid-particle interactions with the number of particles reaching 100. The tool is based on a stabilized space-time finite elem ent formulation for moving boundaries and interfaces and parallel comp uting. Other components of this tool include: fast automatic mesh gene ration with structured layers of elements around the particles and uns tructured meshes elsewhere; an automatic mesh moving method combined w ith remeshing as needed; accurate and efficient projection of the solu tion between the old and new meshes after each remesh; surface mesh re finement as two spheres or a sphere and the tube wall get close; and m ulti-platform computing. We apply this tool to the simulation of two c ases involving 101 spheres falling in a liquid-filled tube. In both ca ses the initial distribution of the spheres in the tube is random. In the first simulation the size of the spheres is also random, whereas i n the second case it is uniform. We demonstrate that the tool develope d can be used for simulation of this class of problems with computing durations kept at acceptable levels.