Vortex particle method in parallel computations on graphical processing units used in study of the evolution of vortex structures

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics and the mutual interaction among various types of vortical motions is a key ingredient in clarifying and controlling fluid motion. In the paper several different cases related to vortex tube interactions are presented. Due to problems with very long computation times on the single processor, the vortex-in-cell (VIC) method is implemented on the multicore architecture of a graphics processing unit (GPU). Numerical results of leapfrogging of two vortex rings for inviscid and viscous fluid are presented as test cases for the new multi-GPU implementation of the VIC method. Influence of the Reynolds number on the reconnection process is shown for two examples: antiparallel vortex tubes and orthogonally offset vortex tubes. Our aim is to show the great potential of the VIC method for solutions of three-dimensional flow problems and that the VIC method is very well suited for parallel computation.