Parallel Dynamic Analysis of a Large-Scale Water Conveyance Tunnel under Seismic Excitation Using ALE Finite-Element Method

Parallel analyses about the dynamic responses of a large-scale water conveyance tunnel under seismic excitation are presented in this paper. A full three-dimensional numerical model considering the water-tunnel-soil coupling is established and adopted to investigate the tunnel’s dynamic responses. The movement and sloshing of the internal water are simulated using the multi-material Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) method. Nonlinear fluid–structure interaction (FSI) between tunnel and inner water is treated by using the penalty method. Nonlinear soil-structure interaction (SSI) between soil and tunnel is dealt with by using the surface to surface contact algorithm. To overcome computing power limitations and to deal with such a large-scale calculation, a parallel algorithm based on the modified recursive coordinate bisection (MRCB) considering the balance of SSI and FSI loads is proposed and used. The whole simulation is accomplished on Dawning 5000 A using the proposed MRCB based parallel algorithm optimized to run on supercomputers. The simulation model and the proposed approaches are validated by comparison with the added mass method. Dynamic responses of the tunnel are analyzed and the parallelism is discussed. Besides, factors affecting the dynamic responses are investigated. Better speedup and parallel efficiency show the scalability of the parallel method and the analysis results can be used to aid in the design of water conveyance tunnels.