PARALLEL ALGORITHM FOR THE VOLTAGE PROFILE SIMULATION FOR THE SYNTHESIS OF SUPERHARD MATERIALS UNDER HIGH PRESSURE AND HIGH TEMPERATURE

Abstract

This article shows a parallel algorithm developed to simulate the electric voltage profile applied to the heating of the compression chamber used in the process of superhard materials synthesis, specifically, diamonds. The computational simulation for the determination of the distribution of the eletrical potential (d.d.p. in volt) is necessary to permit to get, with precision, the value of the heat (in W/mm) that is generated by the eletric current flux in the process. The analysis of temperature distribution let us investigate the graphite to diamond transformation process and also get diamonds of better quality and lower cost. The computational simulation is an important tool in the superhard materials syntesis research, once the real tests show a very high cost and many times they do not show satisfactory answers. We hope we can contribute with the techniques of computational simulation for the diamond synthesis process, using resources of parallelism shown in this article. The purpose to the use of paralelism techniques in the computational simulations is situated in the possibility of offering an ampler research of the superhard material synthesis process, through enlargement of the volume studied in a time of the reduced processing. In the simulations carried out in a small part of the compression chamber of 10mm of ray per 10mm of height, using a matrix 100x100, it was necessary nearly one hour of processing in a SUN FIRE machine with one SPARC III 750 MHz processor. A completed chamber, used in the diamond synthesis, has measurements from 60mm to 100mm and that can be enlarged if there is interest in analysing other parts of the high pressure apparatus that permit the coupling of the compression chamber to the hydraulic press.