Vacuum arc remelting (VAR) is a secondary melting process for exotic alloys. The main purpose of this process is to increase the input ingot’s physical and chemical homogeneity. This is accomplished through the application of a high current that melts the material through the emergence of electrical arcs that induce...
Modern scientific and engineering problems often require simulations with a level of resolution difficult to achieve in reasonable amounts of time—even in effectively parallelized programs. Therefore, applications that exploit high performance computing (HPC) systems have become invaluable in academia and industry over the past two decades. Addressing the questions that...
Simulations of combustion and reacting flows often encounter stiffness in the equations governing chemical kinetics. Explicit solvers for these ordinary differential equations offer low computational expense, but typically cannot efficiently handle stiff systems. In contrast, implicit methods demand greater expense but offer unconditional stability—as a result, most reactive-flow solvers rely...
Engineering applications often require fast, accurate solutions of fluid flow around freely moving bodies. The massive parallelism enabled by graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture enables high performance, offering a promising alternative to traditional solver acceleration via multicore central processing units (CPU). However, fully harnessing GPU parallelism requires specialized algorithms and...
Modeling elementary chemical reactions in ocean fluid dynamics simulations requires significant computing resources, which can be diminished with model reduction techniques. Submesoscale ocean turbulence and biogeochemical reactions in the ocean occur on approximately the same time scale, 105 seconds. This similarity in time scales indicates a strong coupling between these...
Due to global warming wildland fires are increasing in frequency and severity. In the case of wildland fires, the major modes of combustion occur include smoldering combustion and flaming combustion. Smoldering combustion occurs most commonly in porous fuels like peat, forest duff, and woody fuels, which are available in abundance...
For this project, we designed a soot modeling software to produce a full particle density function. This model uses the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo with a full conditioning particle selection method to capture soot nucleation and coagulation in a diffusion flame. We investigate the use of graphic processing units as...
High-potential molecules derived from biomass sources may suitably replace or supplement traditional nonrenewable hydrocarbon fuels to reduce pollution and fuel processing costs. Due to expensive and time-consuming property testing, models that predict key properties from optical data would initially vet potential additives before investment and bench-scale testing. Attenuated Total Reflection...
Small hydrocarbon particles such as soot and soot precursors pose a serious threat to human health and Earth's climate. Understanding the mechanisms by which soot particles form and grow is the first step to reducing the prevalence of these particles. Computational simulations are used to investigate combusting systems which are...
As carbon emissions are negatively impacting ecosystems across the globe, researchers are in a race against time to provide cleaner and more eÿcient power. Detonation engines can help meet the increasing demands for cleaner and more eÿcient power generation by providing an alternative means to use oxy-fuel combustion for carbon...