Some Experiences on the Accuracy and Parallel Performance of OpenFOAM for CFD in Water Turbines

Abstract

50% of the electric power in Sweden is generated by water power. Many of the power plants in Sweden are getting old and some major refurbishments are coming up. Due to the development of numerical methods and computer power the last decades Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is to a large extent used as a design tool for this purpose. The general features of the flow in water turbines can be resolved with todays methods and computational power, but in order to study the flow in detail enormous HPC (High Performance Computing) facilities and new methods are required. The present work presents the water turbine field with its HPC requirements, shows some state-of-the-art results from OpenFOAM CFD analysis, and presents a parallel performance analysis on a Linux cluster using an ordinary gigabit interconnect v.s. an Infiniband interconnect.