A computational technique has been developed to perform compressible flow simulations involving moving boundaries using an embedded boundary approach within the block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (SAMR) framework of AMReX [1,91,92]. We leverage the SAMR capability to obtain quantitatively accurate results whilst using robust, second-order finite volume schemes. A conservative, unsplit, cut-cell approach is utilized and a ghost-cell approach is developed for computing the flux on the moving, embedded boundary faces. A third-order least-squares formulation has been developed to compute the wall velocity gradients, and was found to significantly improve the performance of the solver in terms of the quantitative comparison of surface quantities such as the skin friction coefficient. Various test cases are performed to validate the method, and compared with analytical, experimental, and other numerical results in literature. Inviscid and viscous test cases are performed that span a wide regime of flow speeds – acoustic (harmonically pulsating sphere), smooth flows (expansion fan created by a receding piston) and flows with shocks (shock-cylinder interaction, shock-wedge interaction, pitching NACA 0012 airfoil and shock-cone interaction). A closed system with moving boundaries – an oscillating piston in a cylinder, showed that the percentage error in mass within the system decreases with refinement, demonstrating that the numerical scheme is conservative with grid refinement, but is not discretely conservative. Viscous test cases involve that of a horizontally moving cylinder at Re=40, an inline oscillating cylinder at Re=100, and a transversely oscillating cylinder at Re=185. The judicious use of adaptive mesh refinement with appropriate refinement criteria to capture the regions of interest leads to well-resolved flow features, and good quantitative comparison is observed with the results available in literature.

Spectral deferred corrections (SDC) is an iterative approach for constructing higher-order-accurate numerical approximations of ordinary differential equations. SDC starts with an initial approximation of the solution defined at a set of Gaussian or spectral collocation nodes over a time interval and uses an iterative application of lower-order time discretizations applied to a correction equation to improve the solution at these nodes. Each deferred correction sweep increases the formal order of accuracy of the method up to the limit inherent in the accuracy defined by the collocation points. In this paper, we demonstrate that SDC is well suited to recovering from soft (transient) hardware faults in the data. A strategy where extra correction iterations are used to recover from soft errors and provide algorithmic resilience is proposed. Specifically, in this approach the iteration is continued until the residual (a measure of the error in the approximation) is small relative to the residual of the first correction iteration and changes slowly between successive iterations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy for both canonical test problems and a comprehensive situation involving a mature scientific application code that solves the reacting Navier-Stokes equations for combustion research.

First-principles Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling is used to investigate uncertainty quantification and uncertainty propagation in parameters describing hydrogen kinetics. Specifically, we sample the posterior distribution for thirty-one parameters focusing on the H2O2 and HO2 reactions resulting from conditioning on ninety-one experiments. Established literature values are used for the remaining parameters in the mechanism as well as other thermodynamic and transport data needed to specify fluid properties. The samples are computed using an affine invariant sampler starting with broad, noninformative priors. Autocorrelation analysis shows that O(1M) samples are sufficient to obtain a reasonable sampling of the posterior. The resulting distribution identifies strong positive and negative correlations and several non-Gaussian characteristics. Using samples drawn from the posterior, we investigate the impact of parameter uncertainty on the prediction of two more complex flames: a 2D premixed flame kernel and the ignition of a hydrogen jet issuing into a heated chamber. The former represents a combustion regime similar to the target experiments used to calibrate the mechanism and the latter represents a different combustion regime. For the premixed flame, the net amount of product after a given time interval has a standard deviation of less than 2% whereas the standard deviation of the ignition time for the jet is more than 10%. The samples used for these studies are posted online. These results indicate the degree to which parameters consistent with the target experiments constrain predicted behavior in different combustion regimes. This process provides a framework for both identifying reactions for further study from candidate mechanisms as well as combining uncertainty quantification and propagation to, ultimately, tie uncertainty in laboratory flame experiments to uncertainty in end-use numerical predictions of more complicated scenarios.

In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of such problems. An alternative to MCMC is importance sampling, which can exhibit near perfect scaling with the number of cores on high performance computing systems because samples are drawn independently. However, finding a suitable proposal distribution is a challenging task. Several sampling algorithms have been proposed over the past years that take an iterative approach to constructing a proposal distribution. We investigate the applicability of such algorithms by applying them to two realistic and challenging test problems, one in subsurface flow, and one in combustion modeling. More specifically, we implement importance sampling algorithms that iterate over the mean and covariance matrix of Gaussian or multivariate t-proposal distributions. Our implementation leverages massively parallel computers, and we present strategies to initialize the iterations using “coarse” MCMC runs or Gaussian mixture models.

Reacting flow simulations for combustion applications require extensive computing capabilities. Leveraging the AMReX library, the Pele suite of combustion simulation tools targets the largest supercomputers available and future exascale machines. We introduce PeleC, the compressible solver in the Pele suite, and detail its capabilities, including complex geometry representation, chemistry integration, and discretization. We present a comparison of development efforts using both OpenACC and AMReX’s C++ performance portability framework for execution on multiple GPU architectures. We discuss relevant details that have allowed PeleC to achieve high performance and scalability. PeleC’s performance characteristics are measured through relevant simulations on multiple supercomputers. The success of PeleC’s design for exascale is exhibited through demonstration of a 160 billion cell simulation and weak scaling onto 100% of Summit, an NVIDIA-based GPU supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Our results provide confidence that PeleC will enable future combustion science simulations with unprecedented fidelity.