Consistent SPH Rigid-Fluid Coupling

Jan Bender, Lukas Westhofen, Stefan Rhys Jeske

Vision, Modeling and Visualization (Best Paper Award), 2023

Abstract

A common way to handle boundaries in SPH fluid simulations is to sample the surface of the boundary geometry using particles. These boundary particles are assigned the same properties as the fluid particles and are considered in the pressure force computation to avoid a penetration of the boundary. However, the pressure solver requires a pressure value for each particle. These are typically not computed for the boundary particles due to the computational overhead. Therefore, several strategies have been investigated in previous works to obtain boundary pressure values. A popular, simple technique is pressure mirroring, which mirrors the values from the fluid particles. This method is efficient, but may cause visual artifacts. More complex approaches like pressure extrapolation aim to avoid these artifacts at the cost of computation time.

We introduce a constraint-based derivation of Divergence-Free SPH (DFSPH) --- a common state-of-the-art pressure solver. This derivation gives us new insights on how to integrate boundary particles in the pressure solve without the need of explicitly computing boundary pressure values. This yields a more elegant formulation of the pressure solver that avoids the aforementioned problems.