Dynamic simulation of squeezing flow of ER fluids using parallel processing

In order to understand the flow behavior of Electrorheological (ER) fluid, dynamic simulation has been intensively performed for the last decade. When the shear flow is applied, it is easy to carry out the simulation with relatively small number of particles because of the periodic boundary condition. For the squeezing flow, however, it is not easy to apply the periodic boundary condition, and the number of particles needs to be increased to simulate the ER system more realistically. For this reason, the simulation of ER fluid under squeezing flow has been mostly performed with some representative chains or with the approximation that severely restricts the flow geometry to reduce the computational load. In this study, Message Passing Interface (MPI), which is one of the most widely-used parallel processing techniques, has been employed in a dynamic simulation of ER fluid under squeezing flow. As the number of particles used in the simulation could be increased significantly, full domain between the electrodes has been covered. The numerical treatment or the approximation used to reduce the computational load has been evaluated for its validity, and was found to be quite effective. As the number of particles is increased, the fluctuation of the normal stress becomes diminished and the prediction in general was found to be qualitatively in good agreement with the experimental results.