A Feasibility Study for Natural Disaster Simulations Using a Fully Explicit SPH Method in a GPU Environment

H. T. Senadheera, M. Asai, D. S. Morikawa

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Mesh-free particle methods are increasingly being used instead of grid based numerical methods in many engineering applications, including free-surface fluid flows. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method is one such meshless, Lagrangian particle method utilized for modeling large deformations or flows with free surfaces. In SPH, the problem domain is discretized into particles without any connectivity and physical quantities of the flow are obtained by tracing the motion of particles. SPH was originally developed for compressible flow and has later been improved to satisfy the incompressible condition by various authors. In typical incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics (ISPH) formulations, a semi-implicit integration scheme is applied to particle discretized equations to solve incompressible flow problems. This requires solving linear equations, which takes up a lot of device memory, thus limiting the possibility of carrying out large scale problems. This study explains the application of a fully-explicit time integration scheme for fluid simulations using the ISPH method. In addition, we used a GPU environment for the computer simulations through an authorial program written in CUDA Fortran. Thus, the purposes were to avoid the need of solving linear equations, therefore reducing memory usage and to utilize the parallel processing power of GPU to accelerate the code. On the other hand, GPU is more widely available compared to supercomputer CPUs, which is the generally used environment for ISPH calculations. Dam-break simulations and validation tests were conducted to validate the proposed SPH method. With the proposed method and computational environment, the calculation speed was increased and memory usage was decreased significantly and large fluid simulations could be carried out. Thus, the proposed method and improvements could pave way in simulating large-scale problems, such as tsunami run-up analyses and other natural disaster simulations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICSECM 2019 - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Structural Engineering and Construction Management
EditorsRanjith Dissanayake, Priyan Mendis, Kolita Weerasekera, Sudhira De Silva, Shiromal Fernando
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages275-290
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9789811572210
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event10th International Conference on Structural Engineering and Construction Management, ICSECM 2019 - Kandy, Sri Lanka
Duration: Dec 13 2019Dec 14 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Civil Engineering
Volume94
ISSN (Print)2366-2557
ISSN (Electronic)2366-2565

Conference

Conference10th International Conference on Structural Engineering and Construction Management, ICSECM 2019
Country/TerritorySri Lanka
CityKandy
Period12/13/1912/14/19

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Civil and Structural Engineering

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