Numerical Simulation of Melting with Natural Convection Based on Lattice Boltzmann Method and Performed with CUDA Enabled GPU

A new solver is developed to numerically simulate the melting phase change with natural convection. This solver was implemented on a single Nvidia GPU based on the CUDA technology in order to simulate the melting phase change in a 2D rectangular enclosure. The Rayleigh number is of the order of magnitude of 10(8) and Prandlt is 50. The hybrid thermal lattice Boltzmann method (HTLBM) is employed to simulate the natural convection in the liquid phase, and the enthalpy formulation is used to simulate the phase change aspect. The model is validated by experimental data and published analytic results. The simulation results manifest a strong convection in the melted phase and a different flow pattern from the reference results with low Rayleigh number. In addition, the computational performance is estimated for single precision arithmetic, and this solver yields 703.31 MLUPS and 61.89GB/s device to device data throughput on a Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU.