Accelerating Batched Perfectly Stirred Reactor (PSR) Calculations Using General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) Computing

Detailed analysis of efficiency and pollutant emission characteristics of practical turbulent combustion devices using complex combustion kinetics often depend on the interactions between the chemistry of both gaseous species and soot, and turbulent flow characteristics. Modeling of such combustion system often requires the use of chemical kinetic mechanisms with hundreds of species and thousands of reactions. Perfectly stirred reactors (PSR) are idealized reactor environments, where the reacting species have high rate of stirring, and the combustion products are uniformly distributed inside the reactor. The fundamental equations describing a PSR constitute systems of highly nonlinear algebraic equations, due to the complex relationship between the net production rate of the species and the species concentration, which ultimately makes the equations stiff, and the solution of such equations become highly compute-intensive leading to the need for a efficient and robust solution algorithms. Graphics processing units (GPUs) have widely been used in the past as an effective alternative to central processing units (CPUs), and highly parallel threads of GPUs can be used in a efficient manner to improve the algorithm performance for speeding up the calculations. A highly parallelized GPU implementation is presented for a batched calculation of PSR model.