Research Assistant: Vivek Sarin
Graduate Student: Matthew Knepley
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
This research activity is funded by the NSF as one of the
Grand Challenge Projects. It concerns the direct simulation
of particle flows in Newtonian and viscoelastic fluids.
The research team consists of researchers at Minnesota, Houston,
Pennsylvania,
Purdue, and Stanford. The team at Purdue has constructed
a comprehensive simulation
environment for the flow of particles in viscoelastic fluids,
bringing together the expertise of those members of the teams
in fluid mechanics, computer science,
and mathematics.
It incorporates diverse physical models of the fluid with
many innovative numerical
methods for the solution of the associated partial differential
equations. A new multilevel preconditioner for the
Navier-Stokes equation was developed at Purdue, and has shown
excellent parallel performance for
physical flow problems. The code itself, also developed at Purdue,
uses the MPI and Petsc
framework to ensure portable, extensible, and efficient parallel
code.
Current work at Purdue has also concentrated on developing
effective
parallel nonlinear and linear system solvers and the relationship
of the tolerances involved in these inner-outer iterations.