Simulation of Chemical Reaction Fronts in Anaerobic Digestion of Solid Waste

Abstract

A case study for parallelisation of a code for a nonlinear system of evolution equations is presented. It describes the propagation of reaction fronts in anaerobic waste digestion. These occur as a consequence of heterogeneous initial distributions of material in a landfill site. These heterogeneities can accelerate or slow down the degradation process. The special structure of the particular model is taken into account in the numerical solution, solving the system by components. This leads to numerical tasks of different types, namely numerical quadrature, linear ordinary differential equations, as well as linear and semi-linear parabolic differential equations. The parallelisation of the resulting numerical approximation can be carried out entirely on the loop level. For this purpose some procedures of the well-known SPARSKIT library for numerical linear algebra were parallelised in OpenMP.