The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) can gain a great amount of performance benefit by taking advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) computing, and thus, the GPU, or multi-GPU based LBM can be considered as a promising and competent candidate in the study of large-scale fluid flows. However, the multi-GPU based lattice Boltzmann algorithm has not been studied extensively, especially for simulations of flow in complex geometries. In this paper, through coupling with the message passing interface (MPI) technique, we present an implementation of multi-GPU based LBM for fluid flow through porous media as well as some optimization strategies based on the data structure and layout, which can apparently reduce memory access and completely hide the communication time consumption. Then the performance of the algorithm is tested on a one-node cluster equipped with four Tesla C1060 GPU cards where up to 1732 MFLUPS is achieved for the Poiseuille flow and a nearly linear speedup with the number of GPUs is also observed.

In this paper, an improved singular boundary method (SBM), viewed as one kind of modified method of fundamental solution (MFS), is firstly applied for the numerical analysis of two-dimensional (2D) Stokes flow problems. The key issue of the SBM is the determination of the origin intensity factor used to remove the singularity of the fundamental solution and its derivatives. The new contribution of this study is that the origin intensity factors for the velocity, traction and pressure are derived, and based on that, the SBM formulations for 2D Stokes flow problems are presented. Several examples are provided to verify the correctness and robustness of the presented method. The numerical results clearly demonstrate the potentials of the present SBM for solving 2D Stokes flow problems.

In this paper, a Cauchy problem of two-dimensional heat conduction equation is investigated. This is a severely ill-posed problem. Based on the solution of Cauchy problem of two-dimensional heat conduction equation, we propose to solve this problem by modifying the kernel, which generates a well-posed problem. Error estimates between the exact solution and the regularized solution are given. We provide a numerical experiment to illustrate the main results.

This paper aims to investigate nonlinear oscillations of an elevator cable in a drum drive. The governing equation of motion of the objective system is developed by virtue of Lagrangian’s method. A complicated term is broached in the governing equation of the motion of the system owing to existence of multiplication of a quadratic function of velocity with a sinusoidal function of displacement in the kinetic energy of the system. The obtained equation is an example of a well-known category of nonlinear oscillators, namely, non-natural systems. Due to the complex terms in the governing equation, perturbation methods cannot directly extract any closed form expressions for the natural frequency. Unavoidably, different non-perturbative approaches are employed to solve the problem and to elicit a closed-form expression for the natural frequency. Energy balance method, modified energy balance method and variational approach are utilized for frequency analyzing of the system. Frequency-amplitude relationships are analytically obtained for nonlinear vibration of the elevator’s drum. In order to examine accuracy of the obtained results, exact solutions are numerically obtained and then compared with those obtained from approximate closed-form solutions for several cases. In a parametric study for different nonlinear parameters, variation of the natural frequencies against the initial amplitude is investigated. Accuracy of the three different approaches is then discussed for both small and large amplitudes of the oscillations.

A new scheme for the Zakharov-Kuznetsov (ZK) equation with the accuracy order of is proposed. The multi-symplectic conservation property of the new scheme is proved. The backward error analysis of the new multi-symplectic scheme is also implemented. The solitary wave evolution behaviors of the Zakharov-Kunetsov equation is investigated by the new multi-symplectic scheme. The accuracy of the scheme is analyzed.

A Legendre-collocation method is proposed to solve the nonlinear Volterra integral equations of the second kind. We provide a rigorous error analysis for the proposed method, which indicate that the numerical errors in L2-norm and L∞-norm will decay exponentially provided that the kernel function is sufficiently smooth. Numerical results are presented, which confirm the theoretical prediction of the exponential rate of convergence.

This paper presents a numerical study of the sensitivity of a fluid model known as time relaxation model with respect to variations of the time relaxation coefficient χ. The sensitivity analysis of this model is utilized by the sensitivity equation method and uses the finite element method along with Crank Nicolson method in the fully discretization of the partial differential equations. We present a test case in support of the sensitivity convergence and also provide a numerical comparison between two different strategies of computing the sensitivity, sensitivity equation method and forward finite differences.

The analysis of thermoelastic deformations of a simply supported functionally graded material (FGM) sandwich plates subjected to a time harmonic sinusoidal temperature field on the top surface and varying through-the-thickness is illustrated in this paper. The FGM sandwich plates are assumed to be made of three layers and resting on Pasternak’s elastic foundations. The volume fractions of the constituents of the upper and lower layers and, hence, the effective material properties of them are assumed to vary in the thickness direction only whereas the core layer is still homogeneous. When in-plane sinusoidal variations of the displacements and the temperature that identically satisfy the boundary conditions at the edges, the governing equations of motion are solved analytically by using various shear deformation theories as well as the classical one. The influences of the time parameter, power law index, temperature exponent, top-to-bottom surface temperature ratio, side-to-thickness ratio and the foundation parameters on the dynamic bending are investigated.