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At least 91 records · Page 5

Toward large-scale simulation of residual stress and distortion in wire and arc additive manufacturing

In this study, we aim to advance the structural analysis of wire and arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) by considering the thermomechanical features inherent in direct energy deposition. Simulation approaches including the iterative substructure method (ISM), dynamic mesh refining method (DMRM), and graphics processing unit (GPU) based explicit finite element method (FEM) were developed for accelerating additive manufacturing stress analysis that is very time consuming by conventional numerical methods. ISM and DMRM take advantage of the strong nonlinearity phenomenon near the moving heat source by reducing the global iterations and refining the local mesh, respectively. In addition to the use of GPUs, the explicit FEM is accelerated by a time scaling technique based on the inherent strain concept. The residual stress and distortion of two large builds were analyzed, showing very consistent numerical results and good agreement with experiments. Compared with the commercial software Abaqus, the novel approaches reduced the computational cost substantially without compromising accuracy. The GPU code showed the highest computational efficiency (30~70×), while DMRM and ISM had acceleration factors of 9× and 3×, respectively. Finally, such high-fidelity modeling approaches will be very useful for building up a digital twin of WAAM to reduce development time and cost.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

CFD simulations of electric motor end ring cooling for improved thermal management

Proper thermal management of an electric motor for vehicle applications extends its operating range. One cooling approach is to impinge Automatic Transmission Fluid (ATF) onto the rotor end ring. Increased ATF coverage correlates to enhanced heat transfer. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analytical tools provide a mechanism to assess motor thermal management prior to hardware fabrication. The complexity of the fluid flow (e.g., jet atomization, interface tracking, wall impingement) and heat transfer makes these simulations challenging. Computational costs are high when solving these flows on high-speed rotating meshes. Typically, a Volume-of Fluid (VOF) technique (i.e., two-fluid system) is used to resolve ATF dynamics within this rotating framework. Suitable numerical resolution of the relevant physics for thin films under strong inertial forces at high rotor speeds is computationally expensive, further increasing the run times. In this work, a numerical study of rotor-ring cooling by ATF is presented using a patent automated Cartesian cut-cell based method coupled with Automatic Mesh Refinement (AMR). This approach automatically creates the Cartesian mesh on-the-fly and can effectively handle complex rotating geometries by adaptively refining the mesh based on local gradients in the flow field which results in better resolution of the air-ATF interface. A Single non-inertial Reference Frame (SRF) approach is used to account for the rotating geometry and to further improve the overall computational efficiency. Quasi-steady state conditions are targeted in the analysis of the results. Important physics such as ATF jet structure, velocity detail near the air-jet interface, ATF coverage/accumulation on the ring surface, and cooling capacity are presented for a low-resolution Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS), high-resolution RANS, and high-resolution Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) models. Computations are scaled over hundreds of cores on a supercomputer to maximize turnaround time. Each numerical approach is shown to capture the general trajectory of the oil jet prior to surface impingement. The high-resolution LES simulation, however, is superior in capturing small scale details and heat transfer between the free jet and surrounding air.

42 ENGINEERING↗

An adaptive scalable fully implicit algorithm based on stabilized finite element for reduced visco-resistive MHD

The magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations are continuum models used in the study of a wide range of plasma physics systems, including the evolution of complex plasma dynamics in tokamak disruptions. However, efficient numerical solution methods for MHD are extremely challenging due to disparate time and length scales, strong hyperbolic phenomena, and nonlinearity. Additionally, therefore the development of scalable, implicit MHD algorithms and high-resolution adaptive mesh refinement strategies is of considerable importance. In this work, we develop a high-order stabilized finite-element algorithm for the reduced visco-resistive MHD equations based on the MFEM finite element library (mfem.org). The scheme is fully implicit, solved with the Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) method with a physics-based preconditioning strategy. Our preconditioning strategy is a generalization of the physics-based preconditioning methods in Chacón et al. (2002) to adaptive, stabilized finite elements. Algebraic multigrid methods are used to invert sub-block operators to achieve scalability. A parallel adaptive mesh refinement scheme with dynamic load-balancing is implemented to efficiently resolve the multi-scale spatial features of the system. Our implementation uses the MFEM framework, which provides arbitrary-order polynomials and flexible adaptive conforming and non-conforming meshes capabilities. Results demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and scalability of the implicit scheme in the presence of large scale disparity. The potential of the AMR approach is demonstrated on an island coalescence problem in the high Lundquist-number regime (≥ 10 7 ) with the successful resolution of plasmoid instabilities and thin current sheets.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

PRISMS-PF: A general framework for phase-field modeling with a matrix-free finite element method

Abstract A new phase-field modeling framework with an emphasis on performance, flexibility, and ease of use is presented. Foremost among the strategies employed to fulfill these objectives are the use of a matrix-free finite element method and a modular, application-centric code structure. This approach is implemented in the new open-source PRISMS-PF framework. Its performance is enabled by the combination of a matrix-free variant of the finite element method with adaptive mesh refinement, explicit time integration, and multilevel parallelism. Benchmark testing with a particle growth problem shows PRISMS-PF with adaptive mesh refinement and higher-order elements to be up to 12 times faster than a finite difference code employing a second-order-accurate spatial discretization and first-order-accurate explicit time integration. Furthermore, for a two-dimensional solidification benchmark problem, the performance of PRISMS-PF meets or exceeds that of phase-field frameworks that focus on implicit/semi-implicit time stepping, even though the benchmark problem’s small computational size reduces the scalability advantage of explicit time-integration schemes. PRISMS-PF supports an arbitrary number of coupled governing equations. The code structure simplifies the modification of these governing equations by separating their definition from the implementation of the numerical methods used to solve them. As part of its modular design, the framework includes functionality for nucleation and polycrystalline systems available in any application to further broaden the phenomena that can be used to study. The versatility of this approach is demonstrated with examples from several common types of phase-field simulations, including coarsening subsequent to spinodal decomposition, solidification, precipitation, grain growth, and corrosion.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Multifidelity methods for uncertainty quantification of a nonlocal model for phase changes in materials

This study is devoted to the construction of a multifidelity Monte Carlo (MFMC) method for the uncertainty quantification of a nonlocal, non-mass-conserving Cahn-Hilliard model for phase transitions with an obstacle potential. Here, we are interested in estimating the expected value of an output of interest (OoI) that depends on the solution of the nonlocal Cahn-Hilliard model. As opposed to its local counterpart, the nonlocal model captures sharp interfaces without the need for significant mesh refinement. However, the computational cost of the nonlocal Cahn-Hilliard model is higher than that of its local counterpart with similar mesh refinement, inhibiting its use for outer-loop applications such as uncertainty quantification. The MFMC method augments the desired high-fidelity, high-cost OoI with a set of lower-fidelity, lower-cost OoIs to alleviate the computational burden associated with nonlocality. Most of the computational budget is allocated to sampling the cheap surrogate models to achieve speedup, whereas the high-fidelity model is sparsely sampled to maintain accuracy. For the non-mass-conserving nonlocal Cahn-Hilliard model, the use of the MFMC method results in, for a given computational budget, about an order of magnitude reduction in the mean-squared error of the expected value of the OoI relative to that of the Monte Carlo method.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

HiPACE++ v0.1

Hipace++ is the new implementation of the DESY-LBNL code Hipace (not distributed nor licensed) for plasma acceleration, relying on the quasi-static particle-in-cell (PIC) method, enabling fast and accurate simulations of plasma accelerators for problems satisfying the quasi-static approximation. Plasma acceleration is a priority in the ATAP division, and such problems represent a wide range of parameters. Hipace++ is an HPC (high-performance computing) code running on supercomputers and it provides the first efficient implementation of the quasi-static PIC method on Graphic Processing Units (GPU), showing 10x speedup and using much less resources than CPU implementations for production simulations. It currently runs on Nvidia GPUs and will ultimately be portable to more accelerated HPC platforms. The porting strategy is novel, and can be adapted to other flavors of quasi-static PIC. Besides, Hipace++ aims at using mesh refinement for higher efficiency, thus enabling simulations unfeasible today. For this purpose, Hipace++ depends on the open-source library AMReX (Adaptive Mesh Refinement at EXascale) developed at LBNL.

Vay, Jean-Luc↗

Robust Solution Verification Experiments on Nonuniform Meshes

The activities of verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification (VVUQ) provide a comprehensive means to assess the credibility of computational models. Within VVUQ, solution verification assesses numerical errors and evaluates whether the simulation is sufficiently accurate for its intended applications. As computational modeling gains traction in the development of complex, high-consequence systems, the need for robust solution verification intensifies, particularly because experimental data for these systems are often limited. This work examines improvements in the robustness of Richardson extrapolation (RE), a method commonly used in solution verification to study the discretization error of computational models using a power law. Nonuniform mesh refinement is discussed alongside other pollutants that affect the robustness of the power law model. Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is proposed as a robust strategy to address the uncertainty generated by nonuniform mesh refinement. An exploratory computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study of a 2D planar Poiseuille flow is conducted to determine if nonuniform mesh noise can be modeled with this MLE approach for more robust RE.

Weinmeister, Justin [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000160090237↗

High-Resolution Simulations of Geological CO 2 Injection: Application to the SPE11 Benchmark

Geological carbon sequestration (GCS) will play a critical role in decarbonization and in facilitating the transition to clean energy systems. Because CO 2 is highly mobile, ensuring its safe and permanent injection into subsurface geological formations involves monitoring over larger spatial domains and longer time periods than is typical for hydrocarbon reservoirs. This can benefit from simulation tools capable of modeling key CO 2 trapping mechanisms, particularly those optimized for speed and scalability on high-performance computing systems. Using isothermal versions of the SPE11B and SPE11C benchmark cases, we conduct a mesh refinement study simulating CO 2 injection into kilometer-scale rock formations at centimeter resolution with the GEOS open-source simulation framework. We focus on how mesh refinement improves the accuracy of convective mixing in both 2D and 3D simulations. The computational costs associated with achieving a converged solution highlight the need for predictive upscaling techniques. A systematic performance scaling analysis—including both central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures—complements the “Results” section.

Geosciences↗

Adaptive Grid Redistribution for a 1D Model of Turbulence and Clouds

In global atmospheric models, resolving stratocumulus (Sc) in the vertical is computationally expensive. However, Sc appear only under special meteorological conditions. Therefore, there is motivation to refine the vertical grid levels adaptively. In order to facilitate the possibility of parallelization on graphical processing units, our grid adaptation method prescribes the number of vertical levels a priori. Then grid levels are relocated toward altitude ranges in need of refinement. Because the method relocates existing grid levels, rather than adding extra levels, there is a risk of creating regions with overly coarse grid spacing, that is, voids in the grid mesh. To prevent such voids from forming, a simple method is developed to impose a maximum grid spacing. To decide where to place enhanced resolution, the authors develop an empirical mesh refinement criterion. It refines grid spacing near the ground, near strong temperature gradients, and within clouds. Our grid adaptation method is implemented in a single-column model and evaluated on four test cases: decaying stratocumulus, developing shallow cumulus, a quasi-stationary stratocumulus deck, and the diurnal cycle of a dry boundary layer. In the stratocumulus cases, mesh refinement leads to improvements in both the time evolution of fields and their time averages. The other two cases show smaller differences.

Carstensen, Steffen [Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee↗

An implicit-in-time DPG formulation of the 1D1V Vlasov-Poisson equations

Efficient solution of the Vlasov equation, which can be up to six-dimensional, is key to the simulation of many difficult problems in plasma physics. The discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin (DPG) finite element methodology provides a framework for the development of stable (in the sense of Ladyzhenskaya–Babuška–Brezzi conditions) finite element formulations, with built-in mechanisms for adaptivity. While DPG has been studied extensively in the context of steady-state problems and to a lesser extent with space-time discretizations of transient problems, relatively little attention has been paid to time-marching approaches. In the present work, we study a first application of time-marching DPG to the Vlasov equation, using backward Euler for a Vlasov-Poisson discretization. We demonstrate adaptive mesh refinement for two problems: the two-stream instability problem, and a cold diode problem. Furthermore, we believe the present work is novel both in its application of unstructured adaptive mesh refinement (as opposed to block-structured adaptivity, which has been studied previously) in the context of Vlasov-Poisson, as well as in its application of DPG to the Vlasov-Poisson system. We also discuss extensive additions to the Camellia library in support of both the present formulation as well as extensions to higher dimensions, Maxwell equations, and space-time formulations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Code for Value Decomposition Graph Network and environment for AMR on linear advection

This is the code for the paper [Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Mesh Refinement](https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00801), published at AAMAS 2023. It contains the implementation of a new algorithm, called Value Decomposition Graph Network (VDGN), for applying multi-agent reinforcement learning to the problem of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). It also contains the implementation of a multi-agent environment for AMR on a linear advection problem. VDGN is the first learning algorithm to display anticipatory refinement behavior in AMR, and it outperforms local error threshold-based heuristic strategies.

Yang, Jiachen↗

Resolution requirements for high-speed droplet impact along a rigid wall

The mechanical and thermal loads that are produced on high-speed projectiles from a droplet are key in the projectile development.To accurately predict the pressure produced along the wall surface during impact, it is important to correctly model the air/water interface of the droplet. Novel modeling approaches such as the Phase-Field enable control of the (numerical) interface thickness. However, the interplay between the grid resolution (including potential adaptive mesh refinement) and the interface thickness is unclear. In this work, the resolution requirements for numerical simulations of a two-dimensional cylindrical water droplet impacting a rigid wall at Mach four are computationally investigated. Numerical simulations are performed using a second-order accurate scheme with adaptive mesh refinement and a Phase-Field interface model. The choice of numerical interface thickness and resolution parameters affects the maximum pressure and location of the maximum pressure along the wall. The overall maximum pressure does not converge even at high resolutions. The number of levels and thickness (number of cells across the interface) play a role in obtaining a well behaved solution.

Burrell, E.↗

A hybrid adaptive multiresolution approach for the efficient simulation of reactive flows

Computational studies that use block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) approaches suffer from unnecessarily high mesh resolution in regions adjacent to important solution features. This deficiency limits the performance of AMR codes. In this work a novel hybrid adaptive multiresolution (HAMR) approach to AMR-based calculations is introduced to address this issue. The multiresolution (MR) smoothness indicators are used to identify regions of smoothness on the mesh where the computational cost of individual physics solvers may be decreased by replacing direct calculations with interpolation. We suggest an approach to balance the errors due to the adaptive discretization and the interpolation of physics quantities such that the overall accuracy of the HAMR solution is consistent with that of the MR-driven AMR solution. The performance of the HAMR scheme is evaluated for a range of test problems, from pure hydrodynamics to turbulent combustion.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Advanced modeling of field enhanced thermionic emission

Shaped emitters are of interest to a broad range of applications in vacuum electronic devices. In particular, thermionic energy converters (TECs) take advantage of shaped emitters to increase the local surface field, thereby extracting more current for a given cathode temperature and applied voltage. However, modeling these devices is challenging; Warp [J.-L. Vay, D. P. Grote, R. H. Cohen, and A. Friedman, Comput. Sci. Discov. 5, 014019 (2012)] is a fully 3D particle-in-cell code capable of handling a wide range of physics problems and is well suited to modeling TECs. Additionally, recent improvements to Warp have enabled the accurate modeling of emitters with arbitrary curved surfaces. Specifically, the inclusion of subgrid resolution for computing the electrostatic potential and the ability to apply mesh refinement for specific areas of interest allow for a more accurate solution to the fields on these surfaces. These improvements coupled with Warp’s ability to handle variable particle weights make it an ideal candidate for simulating these complex devices. In this paper, the authors study the applicability of different subgrid configurations for simulating shaped emission surfaces and field convergence for different mesh-refinement techniques. They then implement a custom weighting algorithm that allows for uniform sampling of emission surfaces with a large variation in the surface electric field. They then use this algorithm to study emission for curved emitters in both the field-enhancement regime and the space-charge regime.

Edelen, Jonathan P. (ORCID:0000000215180652)↗

Metrics for Intercomparison of Remapping Algorithms (MIRA) protocol applied to Earth system models

Abstract. Strongly coupled nonlinear phenomena such as those described by Earth system models (ESMs) are composed of multiple component models with independent mesh topologies and scalable numerical solvers. A common operation in ESMs is to remap or interpolate component solution fields defined on their computational mesh to another mesh with a different combinatorial structure and decomposition, e.g., from the atmosphere to the ocean, during the temporal integration of the coupled system. Several remapping schemes are currently in use or available for ESMs. However, a unified approach to compare the properties of these different schemes has not been attempted previously. We present a rigorous methodology for the evaluation and intercomparison of remapping methods through an independently implemented suite of metrics that measure the ability of a method to adhere to constraints such as grid independence, monotonicity, global conservation, and local extrema or feature preservation. A comprehensive set of numerical evaluations is conducted based on a progression of scalar fields from idealized and smooth to more general climate data with strong discontinuities and strict bounds. We examine four remapping algorithms with distinct design approaches, namely ESMF Regrid (Hill et al., 2004), TempestRemap (Ullrich and Taylor, 2015), generalized moving least squares (GMLS) (Trask and Kuberry, 2020) with post-processing filters, and WLS-ENOR (Li et al., 2020). By repeated iterative application of the high-order remapping methods to the test fields, we verify the accuracy of each scheme in terms of their observed convergence order for smooth data and determine the bounded error propagation using challenging, realistic field data on both uniform and regionally refined mesh cases. In addition to retaining high-order accuracy under idealized conditions, the methods also demonstrate robust remapping performance when dealing with non-smooth data. There is a failure to maintain monotonicity in the traditional L2-minimization approaches used in ESMF and TempestRemap, in contrast to stable recovery through nonlinear filters used in both meshless GMLS and hybrid mesh-based WLS-ENOR schemes. Local feature preservation analysis indicates that high-order methods perform better than low-order dissipative schemes for all test cases. The behavior of these remappers remains consistent when applied on regionally refined meshes, indicating mesh-invariant implementations. The MIRA intercomparison protocol proposed in this paper and the detailed comparison of the four algorithms demonstrate that the new schemes, namely GMLS and WLS-ENOR, are competitive compared to standard conservative minimization methods requiring computation of mesh intersections. The work presented in this paper provides a foundation that can be extended to include complex field definitions, realistic mesh topologies, and spectral element discretizations, thereby allowing for a more complete analysis of production-ready remapping packages.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

GR-Athena++: General-relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics Simulations of Neutron Star Spacetimes

We present the extension of GR-Athena++ to general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) for applications to neutron star spacetimes. The new solver couples the constrained transport implementation of Athena++ to the Z4c formulation of the Einstein equations to simulate dynamical spacetimes with GRMHD using oct-tree adaptive mesh refinement. We consider benchmark problems for isolated and binary neutron star spacetimes demonstrating stable and convergent results at relatively low resolutions and without grid symmetries imposed. The code correctly captures magnetic field instabilities in nonrotating stars with total relative violation of the divergence-free constraint of 10 –16 . It handles evolutions with a microphysical equation of state and black hole formation in the gravitational collapse of a rapidly rotating star. For binaries, we demonstrate correctness of the evolution under the gravitational radiation reaction and show convergence of gravitational waveforms. We showcase the use of adaptive mesh refinement to resolve the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability at the collisional interface in a merger of magnetised binary neutron stars. GR-Athena++ shows strong scaling efficiencies above 80% in excess of 10 5 CPU cores and excellent weak scaling is shown up to ~5 × 10 5 CPU cores in a realistic production setup. GR-Athena++ allows for the robust simulation of GRMHD flows in strong and dynamical gravity with exa-scale computers.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

A Block-Structured Adaptive Mesh Framework to Solve Radiation Transfer Equation in Irregular Embedded Geometries

Radiation transport arises in various scientific, industrial, and medical fields, and understanding its effect in applications is needed to make accurate predictions, safety assessments and performance optimizations. Solving the Radiation Transport Equation (RTE) is challenging due to its integro-differential nature, which involves both differential and integral terms. The differential term describes the change in radiation intensity due to absorption and emission, while the integral term accounts for scattering. The accurate modeling of radiation is further complicated in many applications due to the complex, irregular geometries. Various methods exist for solving the RTE, including the zonal, Monte Carlo, spherical harmonics, discrete ordinates, and finite volume methods. Traditional mesh-based approaches, which rely on structured or unstructured meshes, struggle with irregular geometries due to: a) the difficulty of conforming structured grids to irregular domains, b) challenges in enforcing boundary conditions correctly, and c) the additional computational cost of unstructured mesh methods. This work presents a second-order accurate method for solving the RTE in irregular geometries. The radiation intensity is discretized using the finite-volume method in both spatial and angular directions on regular Cartesian grid blocks. Leveraging the block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) framework provided by AMReX, our method refines the grid locally to reduce spatial discretization error, ensuring a converged numerical solution while minimizing computational costs elsewhere. A two-stage deferred correction approach is employed: First, a first-order discretization on grid blocks is solved using an algebraic multigrid method in HYPRE. Second, a correction term is applied explicitly to achieve second-order accuracy. The correction term is calculated by approximating the radiation flux on cell faces using a Total Variation Diminishing (TVD) scheme. This approach ensures quick convergence of the multigrid method while preserving higher-order accuracy of the numerical solution. Irregular geometries are resolved as embedded boundaries (EB), resulting in both cut cells and regular cells. In cut cells, we modify the fluxes using face fractions and incorporate additional contributions from EB boundary conditions. To ensure higher-order convergence near the EB interface, the correction term is modified by interpolating the radiation intensity to fictitious ghost points. The implementation takes advantage of modern supercomputers by leveraging AMReX’sMPI/X parallelization strategy where X can be MPI or a GPU accelerator including CUDA, HIP and DPC++. We validate our solver using classical test cases, both with and without EB, demonstrating accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, we analyze the impact of adaptive mesh refinement on solution accuracy and computational cost, highlighting the advantages of our approach for high-resolution radiation transport simulations.

computational fluid dynamics (CFD)↗

Advanced Turbulence Models for Large-Scale Atmospheric Boundary Layer Flows

We present high-fidelity large-eddy-simulation (LES) modeling approaches for the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) flows. Wind energy is a prime example of an application driven by ABL. Generation of electrical energy from farms of wind turbines at night in the stable ABL is a particularly interesting situation. In this report, we consider the well-known GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment) Atmospheric Boundary Layer Study (GABLS) stably stratified benchmark LES case. We use a high-order spectral element code Nek5000/RS, which is supported under the DOE's Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations (CEED) project, targeting application simulations on various acceleration-device based exascale computing platforms. In our earlier ANL report, we demonstrated our newly developed subgrid-scale (SGS) models based on high-pass filter (HPF), mean-field eddy viscosity (MFEV), and Smagorinsky (SMG) with no-slip and traction boundary conditions, provided with low-order statistics, convergence and turbulent structure analysis. In this report, we extend the range of our SGS modeling approaches in the context of the mean-field eddy viscosity (MFEV), to include the solution of an SGS turbulent kinetic energy equation (TKE). We demonstrate the model fidelity of Nek5000/RS in comparison to that of AMR-Wind, a block-structured second-order finite-volume code with adaptive-mesh-refinement capabilities, with which we studied scaling performance for both codes in comparison on DOE's leadership computing platforms.

17 WIND ENERGY↗