3,068 research outputs found
Hydrodynamics of Suspensions of Passive and Active Rigid Particles: A Rigid Multiblob Approach
We develop a rigid multiblob method for numerically solving the mobility
problem for suspensions of passive and active rigid particles of complex shape
in Stokes flow in unconfined, partially confined, and fully confined
geometries. As in a number of existing methods, we discretize rigid bodies
using a collection of minimally-resolved spherical blobs constrained to move as
a rigid body, to arrive at a potentially large linear system of equations for
the unknown Lagrange multipliers and rigid-body motions. Here we develop a
block-diagonal preconditioner for this linear system and show that a standard
Krylov solver converges in a modest number of iterations that is essentially
independent of the number of particles. For unbounded suspensions and
suspensions sedimented against a single no-slip boundary, we rely on existing
analytical expressions for the Rotne-Prager tensor combined with a fast
multipole method or a direct summation on a Graphical Processing Unit to obtain
an simple yet efficient and scalable implementation. For fully confined
domains, such as periodic suspensions or suspensions confined in slit and
square channels, we extend a recently-developed rigid-body immersed boundary
method to suspensions of freely-moving passive or active rigid particles at
zero Reynolds number. We demonstrate that the iterative solver for the coupled
fluid and rigid body equations converges in a bounded number of iterations
regardless of the system size. We optimize a number of parameters in the
iterative solvers and apply our method to a variety of benchmark problems to
carefully assess the accuracy of the rigid multiblob approach as a function of
the resolution. We also model the dynamics of colloidal particles studied in
recent experiments, such as passive boomerangs in a slit channel, as well as a
pair of non-Brownian active nanorods sedimented against a wall.Comment: Under revision in CAMCOS, Nov 201
Solving the Boltzmann Equation on GPU
We show how to accelerate the direct solution of the Boltzmann equation using
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). In order to fully exploit the computational
power of the GPU, we choose a method of solution which combines a finite
difference discretization of the free-streaming term with a Monte Carlo
evaluation of the collision integral. The efficiency of the code is
demonstrated by solving the two-dimensional driven cavity flow. Computational
results show that it is possible to cut down the computing time of the
sequential code of two order of magnitudes. This makes the proposed method of
solution a viable alternative to particle simulations for studying unsteady low
Mach number flows.Comment: 18 pages, 3 pseudo-codes, 6 figures, 1 tabl
Accelerating Radio Wave Propagation Algorithms by Implementation on Graphics Hardware
Radio wave propagation prediction is a fundamental prerequisite for planning, analysis and optimization of radio networks. For instance coverage analysis, interference estimation or channel and power allocation all rely on propagation predictions. In wireless communication networks optimal antenna sites are determined by either conducting a serie
High Resolution 3D Ultrasonic Breast Imaging by Time-Domain Full Waveform Inversion
Ultrasound tomography (UST) scanners allow quantitative images of the human
breast's acoustic properties to be derived with potential applications in
screening, diagnosis and therapy planning. Time domain full waveform inversion
(TD-FWI) is a promising UST image formation technique that fits the parameter
fields of a wave physics model by gradient-based optimization. For high
resolution 3D UST, it holds three key challenges: Firstly, its central building
block, the computation of the gradient for a single US measurement, has a
restrictively large memory footprint. Secondly, this building block needs to be
computed for each of the measurements, resulting in a massive
parallel computation usually performed on large computational clusters for
days. Lastly, the structure of the underlying optimization problem may result
in slow progression of the solver and convergence to a local minimum. In this
work, we design and evaluate a comprehensive computational strategy to overcome
these challenges: Firstly, we introduce a novel gradient computation based on
time reversal that dramatically reduces the memory footprint at the expense of
one additional wave simulation per source. Secondly, we break the dependence on
the number of measurements by using source encoding (SE) to compute stochastic
gradient estimates. Also we describe a more accurate, TD-specific SE technique
with a finer variance control and use a state-of-the-art stochastic LBFGS
method. Lastly, we design an efficient TD multi-grid scheme together with
preconditioning to speed up the convergence while avoiding local minima. All
components are evaluated in extensive numerical proof-of-concept studies
simulating a bowl-shaped 3D UST breast scanner prototype. Finally, we
demonstrate that their combination allows us to obtain an accurate 442x442x222
voxel image with a resolution of 0.5mm using Matlab on a single GPU within 24h
Viability of Numerical Full-Wave Techniques in Telecommunication Channel Modelling
In telecommunication channel modelling the wavelength is small compared to the physical features of interest, therefore deterministic ray tracing techniques provide solutions that are more efficient, faster and still within time constraints than current numerical full-wave techniques. Solving fundamental Maxwell's equations is at the core of computational electrodynamics and best suited for modelling electrical field interactions with physical objects where characteristic dimensions of a computing domain is on the order of a few wavelengths in size. However, extreme communication speeds, wireless access points closer to the user and smaller pico and femto cells will require increased accuracy in predicting and planning wireless signals, testing the accuracy limits of the ray tracing methods. The increased computing capabilities and the demand for better characterization of communication channels that span smaller geographical areas make numerical full-wave techniques attractive alternative even for larger problems. The paper surveys ways of overcoming excessive time requirements of numerical full-wave techniques while providing acceptable channel modelling accuracy for the smallest radio cells and possibly wider. We identify several research paths that could lead to improved channel modelling, including numerical algorithm adaptations for large-scale problems, alternative finite-difference approaches, such as meshless methods, and dedicated parallel hardware, possibly as a realization of a dataflow machine
- …