Numerical modelling and High Performance Computing for sediment flows

The dynamic of sediments flow is a subject that covers many applications in geophysics, ranging from estuary silting to the comprehension of sedimentary basins. In this seminar we will see how to implement a high performance direct numerical solver for the resolution of fluid dynamics applied to sedimentation problems where the sediment flow contain multiple interacting fluid phases.

In a first part we will introduce the HySoP library, a framework that combines efficient numerical methods running on distributed hybrid CPU-GPU computing platforms. This framework allows us to solve efficiently multiple 2D and 3D fluid problems by discretizing and splitting the Navier-Stokes equations. Several numerical results will be shown.

In a second part we will introduce the sedimentation problem and its discretization. The Navier-Stokes equations will be coupled with two additional advection-diffusion equations modelling the transport of two scalars representing the sediment phases. We will then take a close look to the interactions which lead to several instabilities (Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities and double-diffusivity). We finish by comparing the results to the state of the art.