Parallel 3-D SPH simulations

The gridless Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) numerical method is preferably used in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate complex flows with one or several convoluted free surfaces. This type of flows requires distorted meshes with classical Eulerian mesh-based methods or very fine meshes with Volume of Fluid method. Few 3-D SPH simulations have been carried out to our knowlegde so far, mainly due to prohibitive computational investment since the number of particles required in 3-D is usually too large to be handled by a single processor. In this paper, a parallel 3-D SPH code is presented. Parallelisation validation is discussed as well as promising results regarding speed up of the code. The results of quantitative validations for 2 academic test cases, i.e. a 3-D closed channel flow and a 3-D periodic hill flow are also shown. The code is then applied to a more industrial case, namely a 3-D dam breaking flow impinging on an obstacle. SPH results are satisfactorily compared to experimental data.