Parallel Simulation of Electrophoretic Deposition for Industrial Automotive Applications

Electrophoretic Deposition (EPD) coating is one of the key applications in automotive manufacturing. In the recent years, tools based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) have been utilized to simulate corresponding coating processes. However, the complex data used in this application frequently brings standard CFD applications to its limits. For that purpose, a CFD-based tool named ALSIM has been proposed, which employs a unique volumetric decomposition method that addresses these problems. However, certain characteristics of this methodology yield drawbacks for the typical process used in this application - resulting in large execution times. In this work, we present a parallel scheme for this application which addresses these short-comings. To this end, two layers of parallelism are introduced. Both are implemented by employing OpenMP, allowing for the execution on shared memory parallel architectures. Experimental evaluations confirm the scalability and efficiency of the proposed methods. The simulation time of a typical use case in the automotive industry could be reduced from almost 6 days to 13 hours when employing 16 processing cores.