FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF SOLIDIFICATION USING OBJECT-ORIENTED AND PARALLEL TECHNIQUES

This paper describes an implementation in C++ and in parallel of an ex plicit finite element formulation for the solution of transient heat c onduction problems with phase change. The scheme requires a very small timestep because of its conditional stability, but, as no matrix inve rsion is required, the cost per timestep is an order of magnitude lowe r than for a conventional scheme. The principles of using object-orien ted techniques for general finite element programming are briefly expl ained, while the advantages for parallel processing are described in d etail, including the classes used to perform message passing. An examp le is given showing the performance of the scheme on two completely di fferent parallel machines: a shared memory Silicon Graphics Power Chal lenge, and a distributed memory Gray T3D. The results indicate that th e program scales efficiently for large meshes. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.