Parallel simulation of an ash melting furnace

Abstract

We determine the distribution of heat fluxes of a furnace for burning ash via a simulation of a heat transfer problem. With parallelization of the problem this task can be done faster. Within the volume of the furnace, heat transfer is dominated by radiation, where heat conduction through the walls is important.

Our mathematical model leads to a system of polynomials and the problem is reduced to find a single root. This is done by using an iterative method. We present a parallel implementation for solving this problem and the resulting speedup and efficiency this methodology permits. In particular we have implemented the nonlinear Block-Jacobi-method, Block-Gauss-Seidel and Block-SOR on an INTEL Paragon for both a simpler and a more complex model of the furnace.