A GPU-Accelerated Hydrodynamics Solver for Atmosphere-Fire Interactions
Jhamieka Greenwood, Bryan Quaife · Proceedings of the World Congress on Mechanical, Chemical, and Material Engineering · 2023
A fundamental process to understand fire spread is it's coupling with the atmospheric flow.Building computational tools to simulate this complex flow has several challenges including boundary layer effects, resolving vegetation and the forest canopies, and conserving fluid mass.We develop a two-dimensional hydrodynamic solver that models fire-induced flow as a convective sink that converts the two-dimensional horizontal flow into a vertical flow through the buoyant plume.The resulting equations are the twodimensional Navier-Stokes equations, but with a point-source delta function appearing in the conservation of mass equation.We develop a projection method to solve these equations and implement them on a GPU architecture.The ultimate goal is to simulate wildfire spread faster than real-time, and with the ability for users to introduce real-time updates in an augmented reality sandbox.