Accelerating a Coupled SPH-FEM Solver through Heterogeneous Computing for use in Fluid-Structure Interaction Problems

This work presents a partitioned approach to simulating free-surface flow interaction with hyper-elastic structures in which a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) solver is coupled with a finite-element (FEM) solver. SPH is a mesh-free, Lagrangian numerical technique frequently employed to study physical phenomena involving large deformations, such as fragmentation or breaking waves. As a mesh-free Lagrangian method, SPH makes an attractive alternative to traditional grid-based methods for modeling free-surface flows and/or problems with rapid deformations where frequent re-meshing and additional free-surface tracking algorithms are non-trivial. This work continues and extends the earlier coupled 2D SPH-FEM approach of Yang et al. [1,2] by linking a double-precision GPU implementation of a 3D weakly compressible SPH formulation [3] with the open source finite element software Code_Aster [4]. Using this approach, the fluid domain is evolved on the GPU, while the CPU updates the structural domain. Finally, the partitioned solutions are coupled using a traditional staggered algorithm.