Scaling Scientific Cellular Automata Microstructure Evolution Model of Static Recrystallization toward Practical Industrial Calculations

An attempt to bridge the gap between capabilities offered by advanced full-field microstructure evolution models based on the cellular automata method and their practical applications to daily industrial technology design was the goal of the work. High-performance parallelization techniques applied to the cellular automata static recrystallization (CA-SRX) model were selected as a case study. Basic assumptions of the CA-SRX model and developed modifications allowing high-performance computing are presented within the paper. Particular attention is placed on the development of the parallel computation scheme allowing numerical simulations even for a large volume of material. The development of new approaches to handle communication within the distributed environment is also addressed in the paper as a means to obtain higher computational efficiency. Evaluation of model limits was based on the scalability analysis. The investigation was carried out for the 3D and 2D case studies. Therefore, the complex static recrystallization cellular automata simulation taking into account the influence of recovery, nucleation based on accumulated energy, and the progress of recrystallization as a function of stored energy and grain boundary mobility with high-performance computing capabilities is now possible. The research highlighted that parallelization is more effective with an increasing number of cellular automata cells processed during the entire simulation. It was also proven that the developed parallelization scheme and communication mechanism provides a possibility of obtaining scaled speedup over 700 times for 2D and over 800 times for 3D computational domains, which is crucial for future applications in industrial practice. Therefore, the presented approach’s main advantage is based on the possibility of running the calculation based on input data obtained directly from high-resolution 3D imaging of the microstructure. With that, the full immersion of the experimental results into the numerical model is possible. The second novelty aspect of this work is related to the identification of the quality of model predictions as a function of model size reductions.