Author(s): Liuchao Qiu; Jue Wang
Linked Author(s):
Keywords: Dam breach flow; SPH; GPU; CUDA; Free-surface flows
Abstract: Dam breach can cause significant fatalities and economic costs. The numerical investigation of dam breach flows is playing an increasingly essential role in hydraulic and river engineering in respect to reservoir safety. In this paper, the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) was used to simulate flooding flows due to dam breach. The present SPH model solves the weakly compressible Navier–Stokes equations and the hardware acceleration for SPH calculations was implemented using the novel computing architectures called Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) based on the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The proposed SPH model was validated with a test case of partial dam-break problem where good agreement with the experimental results reported in the literature is observed. We have demonstrated that numerical simulations with a huge number of particles can be realized on a personal computer equipped with a CUDA-enabled GPU card taking advantage of the performance and memory space provided by the new GPU technology. The speedups obtained in this work reveal the possibility to study real-life dam breach problems at a reasonable computational cost. Both the achieved speed-ups and the quantitative agreement with experiments suggest that the SPH methods on GPU with CUDA can be used in dam breach problems with efficiency and reliability.
Year: 2013