ITL/EL Team Awarded Millions of Supercomputer Hours for Modeling Complex Suspensions
December 2010
A team of researchers from ITL and EL have been awarded 75 million hours of computer time over the next three years from the Department of Energy to study the flow properties of large-particle suspensions such as concrete. The award is one of 57 from DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.
High fidelity flow simulations with many thousands of particles with a wide range of sizes and shapes in a non-Newtonian fluid matrix will enable the determination of fundamental rheological parameters such as stress and strain rate in non-analytical rheometer and mixing geometries, properties that cannot now be measured accurately in industrial settings. The results obtained will influence the design of rheometers in ways that could revolutionize the use of these instruments. Not only will this work solve a critical outstanding problem in the cement and concrete industry, but it will also have an enormous influence on the wide array of industries that use vane rheometers and mixers, from food processing to water treatment, to coatings, and to pharmaceuticals.
The research team includes William George, Marc Olano, and Judith Terrill of ITL, Edward Garboczi and Nicos Martys of EL, and Pascal Hebraud of CNRS/ESPCI (France). They will be utilizing the IBM Blue Gene /P system at Argonne National Laboratory to perform the computations.
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