Resumen de Message Passing Interface parallelization of a multi-block structured numerical solver.
Several intricately coupled applications of modern industries fall under the multi-disciplinary domain of Electrohydrodynamics (EHD), where the interactions among charged and neutral particles are studied in context of both fluid dynamics and electrostatics together. The charge particles in fluids are generated with various physical mechanisms, and they move under the influence of external electric field and the fluid velocity. Generally, with sufficient electric force magnitudes, momentum transfer occurs from the charged species to the neutral particles also. This coupled system is solved with the Maxwell equations, charge transport equations and Navier-Stokes equations simulated sequentially in a common time loop. The charge transport is solved considering convection, diffusion, source terms and other relevant mechanisms for species. Then, the bulk fluid motion is simulated considering the induced electric force as a source term in the Navier-Stokes equations, thus, coupling the electrostatic system with the fluid. In this thesis, we numerically investigated some EHD phenomena like unipolar injection, conduction phenomenon in weakly conducting liquids and flow control with dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuators.
Solving such complex physical systems numerically requires high-end computing resources and parallel CFD solvers, as these large EHD models are mathematically stiff and highly time consuming due to the range of time and length scales involved. This thesis contributes towards advancing the capability of numerical simulations carried out within the EFD group at Institut Pprime by developing a high-performance parallel solver with advanced EHD models. Being the most popular and specific technology, developed for the distributed memory platforms, Message Passing Interface (MPI) was used to parallelize our multi-block structured EHD solver. In the first part the parallelization of our numerical EHD solver with advanced MPI protocols such as Cartesian topology and Inter-Communicators is undertaken. In particular a specific strategy has been designed and detailed to account for the multi-block structured grids feature of the code. The parallel code has been fully validated through several benchmarks, and scalability tests carried out on up to 1200 cores on our local cluster showed excellent parallel speed-ups with our approach. A trustworthy database containing all these validation tests carried out on multiple cores is provided to assist in future developments.
The second part of this thesis deals with the numerical simulations of several typical EHD flows. We have examined three-dimensional electroconvection induced by unipolar injection between two planar-parallel electrodes. Unsteady hexagonal cells were observed in our study. 3D flow phenomenon with electro-convective plumes was also studied in the blade-plane electrode configuration considering both autonomous and non-autonomous injection laws. Conduction mechanism based on the dissociation of neutral molecules of a weakly conductive liquid has been successfully simulated. Our results have been validated with some numerical computations undertaken with the commercial code Comsol. Physical implications of Robin boundary condition and Onsager effect on the charge species were highlighted in electroconduction in a rectangular channel. Finally, flow control using Dielectric Barrier Discharge plasma actuator has been simulated using the Suzen-Huang model. Impacts of dielectric thickness, gap between the electrodes, frequency and waveform of applied voltage etc. were investigated in terms of their effect on the induced maximum ionic wind velocity and average body force. Flow control simulations with backward facing step showed that a laminar flow separation could be drastically controlled by placing the actuator at the tip of the step with both electrodes perpendicular to each other.
