An Efficient Acceleration of Solving Heat and Mass Transfer Equations with the Second Kind Boundary Conditions in Capillary Porous Composite Cylinder Using Programmable Graphics Hardware

Abstract

With the recent developments in computing technology, increased efforts have gone into simulation of various scientific methods and phenomenon in engineering fields. One such case is the simulation of heat and mass transfer in capillary porous media, which is becoming more and more important in analysing various scenarios in engineering applications. Analysing such heat and mass transfer phenomenon in a given environment requires us to simulate it. This entails simulation of coupled heat mass transfer equations. However, this process of numerical solution of heat and mass transfer equations is very much time consuming. Therefore, this paper aims at utilizing one of the acceleration techniques developed in the graphics community that exploits a graphics processing unit (GPU) which is applied to the numerical solutions of heat and mass transfer equations. The nVidia Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming model caters a good method of applying parallel computing to program the graphical processing unit. This paper shows a good improvement in the performance while solving the heat and mass transfer equations for capillary porous composite cylinder with the second kind of boundary conditions numerically running on GPU. This heat and mass transfer simulation is implemented using CUDA platform on nVidia Quadro FX 4800 graphics card. Our experimental results depict the drastic performance improvement when GPU is used to perform heat and mass transfer simulation. GPU can significantly accelerate the performance with a maximum observed speedup of more than 7-fold times. Therefore, the GPU is a good approach to accelerate the heat and mass transfer simulation.