Spatial adaptivity with boundary refinement for smoothed particle hydrodynamics fluid simulation.

Abstract

Fluid simulation is well-known for being visually stunning while computationally expensive. Spatial adaptivity can effectively ease the computational cost by discretizing the simulation space with varying resolutions. Adaptive methods nowadays mainly focus on the mechanism of refining the fluid surfaces to obtain more vivid splashes and wave effects. But such techniques hinder further performance gain under the condition where most of the vast fluid surface is tranquil. Moreover, energetic flow beneath the surface cannot be adequately captured with the interior of the fluid still being simulated under coarse discretization. This article proposes a novel boundary-distance based adaptive method for smoothed particle hydrodynamics fluid simulation. The signed-distance field constructed with respect to the coupling boundary is introduced to determine particle resolution in different spatial positions. The resolution is maximal within a specific distance to the boundary and decreases smoothly as the distance increases until a threshold is reached. The sizes of the particles are then adjusted towards the resolution via splitting and merging. Additionally, a wake flow preservation mechanism is introduced to keep the particle resolution at a high level for a period of time after a particle flows through the boundary object to prevent the loss of flow details. Experiments show that our method can refine fluid–solid coupling details more efficiently and effectively capture dynamic effects beneath the surface.