Using the GPU to Design Complex Profile Extrusion Dies

Abstract

In the present work the benefits of using graphics processing units (GPU) to aid the design of complex geometry profile extrusion dies, are studied. For that purpose, a 3D finite volume based code that employs unstructured meshes to solve and couple the continuity, momentum and energy conservation equations governing the fluid flow, together with a constitutive equation, was used. To evaluate the possibility of reducing the calculation time spent on the numerical calculations, the numerical code was parallelized in the GPU, using a simple programing approach without complex memory manipulations. For verification purposes, simulations were performed for three benchmark problems: Poiseuille flow, lid-driven cavity flow and flow around a cylinder. Subsequently, the code was used on the design of two real life extrusion dies for the production of a medical catheter and a wood plastic composite decking profile. To evaluate the benefits, the results obtained with the GPU parallelized code were compared, in terms of speedup, with a serial implementation of the same code, that traditionally runs on the central processing unit (CPU). The results obtained show that, even with the simple parallelization approach employed, it was possible to obtain a significant reduction of the computation times.