Simulations of amphiphilic fluids using mesoscale lattice-Boltzmann and lattice-gas methods

W compare two recently developed mesoscale models of binary immiscible and ternary amphiphilic fluids. We describe and compare the algorithms in detail and discuss their stability properties. The simulation results for the cases of self-assembly of ternary, droplet-phases and binary water-amphiphile sponge phases are compared and discussed. Both models require parallel implementation and deployment on large scale parallel computing resources in order to achieve reasonable simulation times for three-dimensional, models. The parallelization strategies. and performance on two distinct parallel architectures are compared and discussed. Large scale three-dimensional simulation of multiphase fluids requires the extensive use of high performance visualization techniques in order to enable the large quantities of complex data to be interpreted. We report on our experiences with two commercial visualization products: AVS and VTK. We also discuss the application and use of novel computational steering techniques for the more efficient utilization of high performance computing resources. We close the paper with some suggestions for the future development of both models. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.