A Fast and Rigorously Parallel Surface Voxelization Technique for GPU-Accelerated CFD Simulations

This paper presents a fast surface voxelization technique for the mapping of tessellated triangular surface meshes to uniform and structured grids that provide a basis for CFD simulations with the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). The core algorithm is optimized for massively parallel execution on graphics processing units (GPUs) and is based on a unique dissection of the inner body shell. This unique definition necessitates a topology based neighbor search as a preprocessing step, but also enables parallel implementation. More specifically, normal vectors of adjacent triangular tessellations are used to construct half-angles that clearly separate the per-triangle regions. For each triangle, the grid nodes inside the axis-aligned bounding box (AABB) are tested for their distance to the triangle in question and for certain well-defined relative angles. The performance of the presented grid generation procedure is superior to the performance of the GPU-accelerated flow field computations per time step which allows efficient fluid-structure interaction simulations, without noticeable performance loss due to the dynamic grid update.