Engineering topics

King, Scott D.

Publications and source records attributed to King, Scott D..

3 records

NASA NTRS1992

Models of convection-driven tectonic plates - A comparison of methods and results

Recent numerical studies of convection in the earth's mantle have included various features of plate tectonics. This paper describes three methods of modeling plates: through material properties, through force balance, and through a thin power-law sheet approximation. The results obtained are compared using each method on a series of simple calculations. From these results, scaling relations between the different parameterizations are developed. While each method produces different degrees of deformation within the surface plate, the surface heat flux and average plate velocity agree to within a few percent. The main results are not dependent upon the plate modeling method and herefore are representative of the physical system modeled.

King, Scott D.↗

NASA NTRS1990

The relationship between plate velocity and trench viscosity in Newtonian and power-law subduction calculations

The relationship between oceanic trench viscosity and oceanic plate velocity is studied using a Newtonian rheology by varying the viscosity at the trench. The plate velocity is a function of the trench viscosity for fixed Rayleigh number and plate/slab viscosity. Slab velocities for non-Newtonian rheology calculations are significantly different from slab velocities from Newtonian rheology calculations at the same effective Rayleigh number. Both models give reasonable strain rates for the slab when compared with estimates of seismic strain rate. Non-Newtonian rheology eliminates the need for imposed weak zones and provides a self-consistent fluid dynamical mechanism for subduction in numerical convection models.

King, Scott D.↗

NASA NTRS1990

Using a multifrontal sparse solver in a high performance, finite element code

We consider the performance of the finite element method on a vector supercomputer. The computationally intensive parts of the finite element method are typically the individual element forms and the solution of the global stiffness matrix both of which are vectorized in high performance codes. To further increase throughput, new algorithms are needed. We compare a multifrontal sparse solver to a traditional skyline solver in a finite element code on a vector supercomputer. The multifrontal solver uses the Multiple-Minimum Degree reordering heuristic to reduce the number of operations required to factor a sparse matrix and full matrix computational kernels (e.g., BLAS3) to enhance vector performance. The net result in an order-of-magnitude reduction in run time for a finite element application on one processor of a Cray X-MP.

King, Scott D.↗