Large-Scale Three-Dimensional Simulation of Dendritic Solidification Using Lattice Boltzmann Method

A parallel three-dimensional (3D) lattice Boltzmann (LB)-cellular automaton (CA) model is developed to simulate dendritic growth during solidification of metallic binary alloys. The LB method was used to solve the transport equations and a CA algorithm was employed to capture the solid/liquid interface. The model is capable of simulating the evolution of solidification microstructures containing thousands of dendrites in a macroscale domain with approximately 36 billion grid points. The simulation results for columnar dendrite growth in a 1-mm(3) region are presented. The parallel model shows a great scale-up performance on up to 40,000 computing cores and an excellent speed-up performance on up to 1000 cores. The model presented in this article helps to pave the way for direct numerical simulation of solidification microstructures in large macroscale domains as the technique can be efficiently implemented on massively parallel supercomputers.