The Study of Thermal-solid Coupling Problems Using Open Source CAE Software

We have been developing the ADVENTURE system, which is an open source CAE software based on parallel finite element method. Two of it‘s main modules are ADVENTURE_Thermal and ADVENTURE_Solid. A thermal-solid coupling system has been developed using these two modules. Three dimensional heat transfer and thermal stresses of a cooling stave in a blast furnace is modeled and analyzed using the developed system. The steady state heat conduction through the model is analysed using the ADVENTURE_Thermal module. Then the temperature distribution is considered as thermal load in the structural analysis. The ADVENTURE_Solid is used for this purpose. Both modules are featured with the parallel finite element method to solve large scale problems. Quite commonly, the matrix that participates in the finite element computation is sparse. Sparse matrix by definition, are populated primarily with many zeroes and thus special storage schemes need to be used to enable efficient storage and computational operations. Skyline storage scheme was used in the modules of old version. In this paper, several sparse matrix storage schemes that show the better performance compare to the Skyline storage are implemented in both modules. Impacts of sparse matrix storage schemes on the total execution time and required memory areevaluated in both thermal and solid analysis of a large scale model.