HIGHLY SCALABLE PARALLEL COMPUTATIONAL MODELS FOR LARGE-SCALE RTM PROCESS MODELING SIMULATIONS, PART 1: THEORETICAL FORMULATIONS AND GENERIC DESIGN

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This article reports the recent development of a highly scalable parallel computational model for process modeling and manufacturing applications of large-scale composite structures with particular emphasis on resin transfer molding (RTM). Fundamental concepts and characteristic features of the proposed scalable parallel algorithms are described and developed in technical detail. The approaches for simulating process modeling and manufacturing applications of composites includes: (1) the traditional, explicit control-volume finite-element (CV-FE) approach, and (2) a recently developed and new, implicit pure finite-element pure (pure FE) approach. SGI Power Challenge and SGI Origin 2000, which are symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) computing platforms, are employed in this study. The issues of implementation and software development of these manufacturing process simulations are parallel algorithm development, data structures, and interprocessor communication strategies, with emphasis on performance and scalability on these symmetric multiprocessors. W ith the motivation for providing effective computational procedures suitable for practical process modeling and manufacturing applications of large-scale composite structures and general finite-element simulations, the proposed developments not only provide a sound theoretical basis but also serve to be ideally portable to a wide range of parallel architectures. W hereas the theoretical formulations and generic design are described in Part 1, the parallel formulation of the theory and implementation will be presented in Part 2, and the techniques developed are applied to large-scale problems using Power Challenge and SGI Origin to demonstrate the effectiveness and the practical applicability, which will be presented in Part 3 of this work.