An Investigation into the Accuracy, Stability and Parallel Performance of a Highly Stable Explicit Technique for Stiff Reaction-Transport PDEs

The numaical simulation of chemically reacting flows is a topic that has attracted a great deal of cunent research At the heart of numerical reactive flow simulations are large sets of coupled, nonlinear Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) Due to the stiffness that is usually present,, explicit time differencing schemes are not used despite theil inherent simplicity and efficiency on parallel and vector machines, since these schemes requile prohibitively small numerical stepsizes Implicit time differencing schemes, although possessing good stability characteristics, introduce a great deal of computational overhead necessary to solve the simultaneous algebraic system at each timestep This thesis examines an algorithm based on a preconditioned time diflaencing scheme The algorithm is explicit and permits a large stable time step An investigation of the algorithm’s accuracy, stability and performance on a palallrl architecture is presen(ed r I