Improvement in the Accuracy and Efficiency of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics: Point Generation and Adaptive Particle Refinement/Coarsening Algorithms

Abstract

An adaptive particle refinement (APR) algorithm has been developed for the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method to augment the resolution of the region of interest to achieve high accuracy and simultaneously reduce the cost of computational resources. It is widely applied in the field of fluid-controlling problems involving large interface deformations, such as the two-phase flow and fluid–structure interaction because this algorithm can capture the interface with high accuracy. Nonetheless, existing APR algorithms widely encounter computational dispersion issues at the interface of regions of different particle resolutions. Moreover, traditional shifting algorithms applied in the APR processes also have difficulties in dealing with particles with different smooth lengths. In this work, an algorithm for fast particle generation was first developed based on the accelerated ray method, which accelerates the discretization of the flow field into particles. Then, a dynamic refinement/coarsening algorithm based on the APR algorithm is proposed to solve the computational dispersion problem that occurs at the refinement/coarsening interfaces. In addition, the shifting algorithm was improved in this work to ensure the particles are always well distributed during numerical calculations and, thus, can efficiently facilitate the adaptive particle refinement/coarsening processes. Comparative analysis indicates that the robust algorithms developed for the SPH method in this work can lead to more precise and reasonable flow fields compared with the conventional SPH adaptive methods.

Keywords

• smoothed particle hydrodynamics
• point generation algorithm
• adaptive particle refinement
• dynamic refinement/coarsening
• shifting algorithm