State-to-state kinetics in CFD simulation of hypersonic flows using GPUs

This chapter presents the new algorithm, optimized for running on a GPU (graphic processing unit) that couples fluid dynamic equations with the vibrational state-to-state kinetic model for air and pure nitrogen mixtures. This model has been applied to rebuild an experiment conducted in the hypersonic wind tunnel EAST at NASA AMES and to compare with the measurement of the shock stand-off distance around a sphere, using 2D geometries. The GPU code shows better performances than a CPU in terms of calculation time (speedup approximately 100) and energy consumption. The results present good prediction capabilities, giving a deeper insight in the physics of hypersonic flows.