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A novel surface tension formulation for SPH fluid simulation

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Abstract

Surface tension plays a significant role in fluid simulation, especially small-scale fluid. In this paper, we present a novel surface tension formulation for smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to simulate interfacial fluid flow. The surface tension formulation is decomposed into three main processes: (1) volume-preserved mesh smoothing, (2) surface tension computation and (3) surface tension transfer. Firstly, we exploit a Lagrangian operator to smooth an initial three-dimensional discrete interfacial surface mesh generated from fluid particles; and then the surface mesh is scaled in a volume-preserved way and the center is translated to its original position to get a smoothed mesh. Secondly, surface tension strengths on the vertices of the interfacial surface mesh are computed according to the offsets from the original surface mesh to the smoothed mesh. Finally, we transfer the surface tension strengths from the mesh vertices onto their neighbor fluid particles in a conservative way. The proposed surface tension solver is simple and straightforward to be plugged into a standard SPH solver. Experimental results show that it is effective and efficient to produce realistic fluid simulations, especially for the phenomena with strong surface tension.

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Acknowledgments

The authors sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their kind suggestions. The authors also thank Xuemin Liu and Cheng Wang at the School of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Forestry University, for their hard work on the final result rendering and to Dong Li for his careful grammar revision. The work in this paper has been supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. BLX2012049, 2015ZCQ-XX), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61402038, 61100132), CCF-Tencent Open Fund in 2014.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China

    Meng Yang & Gang Yang

  2. The State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Meng Yang, Xiaosheng Li & Enhua Wu

  3. Department of Computer and Information Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau, China

    Enhua Wu

  4. The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xiaosheng Li & Enhua Wu

  5. School of Information Engineering, Chang’an University, Xi’an, China

    Youquan Liu

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  1. Meng Yang
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  2. Xiaosheng Li
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  4. Gang Yang
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  5. Enhua Wu
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Correspondence to Meng Yang.

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Yang, M., Li, X., Liu, Y. et al. A novel surface tension formulation for SPH fluid simulation. Vis Comput 33, 597–606 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-016-1274-4

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