ANALYSIS OF HEAT TRANSFER IN SLIP-FLOW REGIME BY PARALLEL IMPLEMENTATION OF LATTICE-BOLTZMANN METHOD on GPUs

In this study, fluid flow and heat transfer in two-dimensional microchannels are studied nu-merically. A computer code based on Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) is developed for this purpose. The code is written by using MAT-LAB and Jacket softwares and has the im-portant feature of being able to run parallel on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Ob-tained velocity profiles and Nusselt numbers are compared with the Navier-Stokes based analyt-ical and numerical results available in the lit-erature and good matches are observed. Slip-velocity and temperature-jump boundary con-ditions are used for the microchannel simula-tions with Knudsen number values covering the slip-flow regime. Speed of the parallel version of the developed code running on GPUs is com-pared with that of the serial one running on CPU and for large enough meshes more than 14 times speed-up is observed. NOMENCLATURE f distribution function feq Equilibrium distribution function g thermal distribution function geq thermal equilibrium distribution function H channel height k thermal conductivit