The multidisciplinary C-SAFE project at Utah has been concerned with developing algorithms and software to model a wide variety of challenging physical problems related to fluid structure interaction. Some of these problems arise from the transport of hazardous materials. For example, in 2005, a truck carrying 36,000 pounds of high explosives on U.S. Route 6 in Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah, rolled over, caught fire, and within three minutes, detonated in a devastating explosion. The detonation produced a crater approximately 70 feet across by 30 feet deep, and hot metal shards from the trailer set fire to the surrounding hillsides up to a quarter mile away.
Simulations, such as those undertaken by the multidisciplinary C-SAFE team, play an important role in prevention of such accidents and involve the use of multiscale multi-physics models and innovative computational techniques on large-scale parallel computers. An over view of the key physical insights used to reduce complexity and computational techniques will be given as well as results on a number of challenging physical problems. An analysis of the particle method used will be provided in outline. A key feature of such simulations is the need to vary the grid resolution to capture the different space and time scales in the simulation. The parallel implementation of such algorithms will be shown. The results obtained are counter-intuitive and challenging with regard to the transportation of hazardous materials.
An attempt to estimate the uncertainty in such models will be made.