Parallel Monte Carlo simulation of aerosol dynamics

Abstract

A highly efficient Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm is developed for the numerical simulation of aerosol dynamics, that is, nucleation, surface growth, and coagulation. Nucleation and surface growth are handled with deterministic means, while coagulation is simulated with a stochastic method (Marcus-Lushnikov stochastic process). Operator splitting techniques are used to synthesize the deterministic and stochastic parts in the algorithm. The algorithm is parallelized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI). The parallel computing efficiency is investigated through numerical examples. Near 60% parallel efficiency is achieved for the maximum testing case with 3.7 million MC particles running on 93 parallel computing nodes. The algorithm is verified through simulating various testing cases and comparing the simulation results with available analytical and/or other numerical solutions. Generally, it is found that only small number (hundreds or thousands) of MC particles is necessary to accurately predict the aerosol particle number density, volume fraction, and so forth, that is, low order moments of the Particle Size Distribution (PSD) function. Accurately predicting the high order moments of the PSD needs to dramatically increase the number of MC particles. 2014 Kun Zhou et al.