This paper describes the parallelization of a Finite Element program able to
calculate coupled
thermal-mechanical numerical problems. This software package is used to
simulate the solidification
and cooling phase during a casting process. This kind of problems are very
demanding on computing power
of high-end workstations which are typically not available in small and medium
sized enterprises.
On the contrary clusters of PCs are a cheap computing resource. The bottleneck
of such architectures
is the slow communication network. To overcome this a new parallelization
algorithm is introduced in this paper.
A two step partitioning of the FE mesh in combination with the alternating
Schwarz method, which involves
overlapping domain decompositions, has been implemented. Tests of the parallel
algorithm with two realistic
examples show a rather good speedup. These results also show that the approach
followed in this work has the
potential to make parallel coupled simulation feasible for the casting
industry.
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