Highly efficient integrated simulation of electro-membrane processes for desalination of sea water

Abstract

Electrodialysis is an efficient process for sea water desalination. In this process, sea water flows through the channel with a complex spacer structure that separates the ion exchange membranes. The multi-species lattice Boltzmann model for liquid mixture modeling has been chosen to study the transport phenomena of ionized liquids in the spacer filled channel. This model is implemented in the highly scalable simulation framework APES based on octree meshes. In this paper, the performance and scalability of our implementation on the Cray XE6 system Hermit in Stuttgart are presented. The performance analysis is performed on periodic cubic domains with different compilers and communication patterns. The scalability of our solver with spacer structure for single-fluid LBM and multi-species LBM with three species mixture are presented. The spacer structure is scaled from single spacer element to full length of laboratory experiment spacer.