High-performance computing cluster

• Subject Area: Process Engineering, Technical Chemistry
• Term: from 2021 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 463921749

The focus of research at the chair of mechanical process engineering and materials processing is the modeling and simulation of particulate systems using methods such as the Discrete Element Method (DEM) and its coupling to numerical flow simulations (CFD). Regarding the latter, the solution of volume- and Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) or the application of the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) as well as of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is pursued. In this context the Discrete Element Method is already a computationally intensive process that increases in numerical complexity depending on the number of particles, if e.g. non-spherical particle shape is taken into account or particles in the range down to 1 µm are considered. The flow simulations coupled to the DEM become particularly complex if large domains are considered volume-averaged with a corresponding number of cells, the description of the fluid phase is discrete (e.g. in the SPH) or the Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of particle-laden flows is intended (e.g. in the LBM or the SPH), whereby this increasingly is required to develop closure approaches. Regarding the listed aspects, a focus of the research at the chair of mechanical process engineering and materials processing is not only the application of the aforementioned methods to mechanical process engineering, but also in particular the method advancement. In this sense, the provision of local computing resources is of central importance in order to perform direct testing but also application with corresponding parallelization, which cannot be dispensed. With this in mind, an expansion of the existing computing infrastructure is applied for with this proposal, whereby the corresponding utilization can be satisfactory guaranteed (see section 3. - use in research). In the expansion, the data management, which is carried out by means of a RAID system, is particularly taken into account. The requested extension enables the chair of mechanical process engineering and materials processing to address future-oriented numerical questions with regard to particle-laden multiphase flows without resolution restrictions and thus to improve processes, to clarify the fundamentals of particle-laden flows and, in particular, to develop and extend new numerical methods to improve the description of the aforementioned systems.

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Major Instrumentation: Hochleistungsrechencluster
• Instrumentation Group: 7030 Dedizierte, dezentrale Rechenanlagen, Prozeßrechner
• Applicant Institution: Technische Universität Berlin
• Leader: Professor Dr.-Ing. Harald Kruggel-Emden