Large-scale grid-enabled lattice-Boltzmann simulations of complex fluid flow in porous media and under shear

Abstract

Well designed lattice-Boltzmann codes exploit the essentially embarrassingly parallel features of the algorithm and so can be run with considerable efficiency on modern supercomputers. Such scalable codes permit us to simulate the behaviour of increasingly large quantities of complex condensed matter systems. In the present paper, we present some preliminary results on the large scale three-dimensional lattice-Boltzmann simulation of binary immiscible fluid flows through a porous medium derived from digitised x-ray microtomographic data of Bentheimer sandstone, and from the study of the same fluids under shear. Simulations on such scales can benefit considerably from the use of computational steering and we describe our implementation of steering within the lattice-Boltzmann code, called LB3D, making use of the RealityGrid steering library. Our large scale simulations benefit from the new concept of capability computing, designed to prioritise the execution of big jobs on major supercomputing resources. The advent of persistent computational grids promises to provide an optimal environment in which to deploy these mesoscale simulation methods, which can exploit the distributed nature of compute, visualisation and storage resources to reach scientific results rapidly; we discuss our work on the grid-enablement of lattice-Boltzmann methods in this context.

17 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Phil.Trans.R.Soc.Lond.A

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• Detection and tracking of defects in the gyroid mesophase
• On the effect of surfactant adsorption and viscosity change on apparent slip in hydrophobic microchannels
• Structural transitions and arrest of domain growth in sheared binary immiscible fluids and microemulsions
• Stress response and structural transitions in sheared gyroidal and lamellar amphiphilic mesophases: lattice-Boltzmann simulations
• Mesoscale simulation of soft particles with tunable contact angle in multi-component fluids
• Lattice Boltzmann simulations of drying suspensions of soft particles
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