Scalable computation of thermomechanical turbomachinery problems

A commonly held view in the turbomachinery community is that finite element methods are not well-suited for very large-scale thermomechanical simulations. We seek to dispel this notion by presenting performance data for a collection of realistic, large-scale thermomechanical simulations. We describe the necessary technology to compute problems with $O(10^7)$ to $O(10^9)$ degrees-of-freedom, and emphasise what is required to achieve near linear computational complexity with good parallel scaling. Performance data is presented for turbomachinery components with up to 3.3 billion degrees-of-freedom. The software libraries used to perform the simulations are freely available under open source licenses. The performance demonstrated in this work opens up the possibility of system-level thermomechanical modelling, and lays the foundation for further research into high-performance formulations for even larger problems and for other physical processes, such as contact, that are important in turbomachinery analysis.The support of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is gratefully acknowledged. CNR is supported by EPSRC Grant EP/N018877/1