GPU-accelerated three-dimensional phase-field simulation of dendrite growth in a nickel-based superalloy

Abstract

The microstructure formation of a nickel-based superalloy during solidification in three dimensions was investigated using the phase-field method. To accelerate the large-scale phase-field simulation, a parallel computing approach was developed using the graphic processing unit (GPU), and the limitation of insufficient GPU memory was circumvented by employing an asynchronous concurrent algorithm. The performance of the GPU-based parallel computing method was tested and the results demonstrate that a maximum performance of 774.292 GFLOPS (giga floating-point operations per second) can be obtained using a single NVIDIA GTX1080 GPU. In simulations of isothermal solidification, the microstructure evolution of a single and multiple dendrites under different undercooling levels was shown in detail. During the solidification, the dendrite tip growth velocity and fraction solid were recorded and then analyzed. In simulations of directional solidification, the formation of primary dendrite arms under different temperature gradients was investigated, and the simulated microstructure was in good agreement with experimental observations. Additionally, the distribution of primary dendrite arm spacing was quantitatively analyzed by Voronoi tessellation. Finally, simulation of polycrystalline growth in directional solidification was conducted to study the dendrite competitive growth. The unusual overgrowth phenomenon was observed in the initial growth stage, while as the solidification process proceeded, the dendrites with small inclination angles were more likely to overgrow the dendrites with large inclination angles.