A Parallel Implementation of the Finite Volume Method for the Simulation of the Natural Convection in a Closed Cavity

In this work, we present a parallel implementation of an algorithm that simulates the natural convection of fluids in a closed cavity. The method is based on the Boussinesq approximation; and it is numerically solved using the finite volume method, based on the Power-Law interpolating scheme. The pressure-velocity coupling is solved using SIMPLEC algorithm. The software was implemented in Fortran with message passing on a Pentium III processors Linux cluster. The solution is validated upon comparison with experimental results available in the literature. It is shown that the use of parallelism provides a significant speedup and efficiency, without degradation of the quality of the results.

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