Abstract
The Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method is widely considered as the most accurate method for dilute gas flow simulation when they violate continuum hypothesis. However the application of DSMC is a computationally intensive method for realistic problems and hence motivates the usage of parallel computers to reduce the computational time. This work discusses the parallelization aspects of the three dimensional DSMC method for micro flow simulations used in computing the flow field in the narrow gap of a slider air bearing. The performance of the parallel DSMC code on several advanced computing platforms illustrating the portability and scalability of the method are compared and discussed. Superlinear speedup, implying a drastic reduction in the computational time has been obtained for all cases on all the parallel computing platforms. Load balancing aspects have also been considered and a dynamic load balancing scheme has also been implemented which results in further computational savings.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ali S, Damodaran M and Quock Y Ng, Computational Models for Predicting Airflow Induced Particle Contamination in Hard Disk Drive Enclosures, AIAA Paper No. AIAA-2005-5342, 2005
Huang W and Bogy D B, Three-dimensional Direct Simulation Monte Carlo method for slider air bearings, Phys. Fluids, Vol 9, pp 1764–1769, 1997
Dietrich S and Boyd I D, Scalar and Parallel optimized implementation of the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo method, JCP, Vol 126, pp 328–342, 1996
LeBeau G J, A parallel implementation of the direct simulation Monte Carlo method, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., Vol 174, pp 319–337, 1999
Fang W and Liou W, Microfluid Flow Computations Using a Parallel DSMC Code, AIAA Paper No. AIAA-2002-1057, 2002
Aktas O, Aluru N R and Ravaioli U, Application of a parallel DSMC technique to predict flow characteristics in microfluidic filters, IEEE JMEMS, Vol 10, No 4, 2001
Bird G A, Molecular Gas Dynamics and the Direct Simulation of Gas Flows, Oxford: Clarendon, 1994
Nance R P, Hash D B and Hassan H A, Role of Boundary Conditions in Monte Carlo Simulation of MEMS Devices, J. Thermophys.Heat Transfer 12, 447–49, 1998
Wang M and Li Z, Simulations for gas flows in microgeometries using the direct simulation Monte Carlo method, Int J Heat and Fluid Flow, 25, 975–85, 2004
Gropp William, Using MPI: portable parallel programming with the message-passing interface, MIT press, 1994
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Benzi, J., Damodaran, M. (2009). Parallel Three Dimensional Direct Simulation Monte Carlo for Simulating Micro Flows. In: Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics 2007. Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, vol 67. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92744-0_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92744-0_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-92743-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-92744-0
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)