Implicit Surface Tension for SPH Simulations

Stefan Rhys Jeske, Lukas Westhofen, Fabian Löschner, José Antonio Fernández-Fernández, Jan Bender

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Presented at SIGGRAPH '24), 2023

Abstract

The numerical simulation of surface tension is an active area of research in many different fields of application and has been attempted using a wide range of methods. Our contribution is the derivation and implementation of an implicit cohesion force based approach for the simulation of surface tension effects using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. We define a continuous formulation inspired by the properties of surface tension at the molecular scale which is spatially discretized using SPH. An adapted variant of the linearized backward Euler method is used for time discretization, which we also strongly couple with an implicit viscosity model. Finally, we extend our formulation with adhesion forces for interfaces with rigid objects.

Existing SPH approaches for surface tension in computer graphics are mostly based on explicit time integration, thereby lacking in stability for challenging settings. We compare our implicit surface tension method to these approaches and further evaluate our model on a wider variety of complex scenarios, showcasing its efficacy and versatility. Among others, these include but are not limited to simulations of a water crown, a dripping faucet and a droplet-toy.