Parallelization of Numerical Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis in Parallel Plate Channel Using OpenMP

Abstract

Conjugate heat transfer and fluid flow is a common phenomenon occurring in parallel plate channels. Finite volume method (FVM) formulation-based semi-implicit pressure linked equations algorithm is a common technique to solve the Navier–Stokes equation for fluid flow simulation in such phenomena, which is computationally expensive. In this article, an indigenous FVM code is developed for numerical analysis of conjugate heat transfer and fluid flow, considering different problems. The computational time spent by the code is found to be around 90% of total execution time in solving the pressure (P) correction equation. The remaining time is spent on U, V velocity, and temperature (T) functions, which use tri-diagonal matrix algorithm. To carry out the numerical analysis faster, the developed FVM code is parallelized using OpenMP paradigm. All the functions of the code (U, V, T, and P) are parallelized using OpenMP, and the parallel performance is analyzed for different fluid flow, grid size, and boundary conditions. Using nested and without nested OpenMP parallelization, analysis is done on different computing machines having different configurations. From the complete analysis, it is observed that flow Reynolds number (Re) has a significant impact on the sequential execution time of the FVM code but has a negligible role in effecting speedup and parallel efficiency. OpenMP parallelization of the FVM code provides a maximum speedup of up to 1.5 for considered conditions.