An efficient three-dimensional numerical simulation of particle acoustic agglomeration with fine-grained parallelization on graphical processing unit

To overcome the challenge of large particle number concentration in the simulation of realistic particle acoustic agglomeration process, the implementation and validation of an efficient three-dimensional simulation method with a fine-grained Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) based parallel strategy is proposed. In detail, the motion of the simulated particles is solved with the Discrete Element Method (DEM) that includes three major particle acoustic agglomeration mechanisms, two particle collision processes and varying agglomerate porosity. Under the framework of the spatial decomposition method, the fine-grained parallel algorithm allocates the computation workload of each simulated particle one-by-one to one GPU thread. Speed test shows that the developed algorithm could achieve relatively elevated efficiencies and high speedup ratios. For method validation, the predicted particle agglomeration rate is compared with experimental measurements in the literature. The agreement of the results demonstrates that the developed method could reproduce realistic particle agglomeration rate as in the experiment.