
Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a computational method used for simulating the mechanics of continuum media, such as
solid mechanics
Solid mechanics, also known as mechanics of solids, is the branch of continuum mechanics that studies the behavior of solid materials, especially their motion and deformation under the action of forces, temperature changes, phase changes, and ...
and
fluid
In physics, a fluid is a liquid, gas, or other material that continuously deforms (''flows'') under an applied shear stress, or external force. They have zero shear modulus, or, in simpler terms, are substances which cannot resist any shea ...
flows. It was developed by Gingold and
Monaghan
Monaghan ( ; ) is the county town of County Monaghan, Ireland. It also provides the name of its civil parish and barony.
The population of the town as of the 2016 census was 7,678. The town is on the N2 road from Dublin to Derry and Letterken ...
and Lucy in 1977, initially for astrophysical problems. It has been used in many fields of research, including
astrophysics
Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the he ...
,
ballistics
Ballistics is the field of mechanics concerned with the launching, flight behaviour and impact effects of projectiles, especially ranged weapon munitions such as bullets, unguided bombs, rockets or the like; the science or art of designing ...
,
volcanology
Volcanology (also spelled vulcanology) is the study of volcanoes, lava, magma and related geological, geophysical and geochemical phenomena (volcanism). The term ''volcanology'' is derived from the Latin word '' vulcan''. Vulcan was the a ...
, and
oceanography. It is a
meshfree Lagrangian method (where the co-ordinates move with the fluid), and the resolution of the method can easily be adjusted with respect to variables such as
density
Density (volumetric mass density or specific mass) is the substance's mass per unit of volume. The symbol most often used for density is ''ρ'' (the lower case Greek letter rho), although the Latin letter ''D'' can also be used. Mathematicall ...
.
Method
Advantages
* By construction, SPH is a
meshfree method
In the field of numerical analysis, meshfree methods are those that do not require connection between nodes of the simulation domain, i.e. a mesh, but are rather based on interaction of each node with all its neighbors. As a consequence, origina ...
, which makes it ideally suited to simulate problems dominated by complex boundary dynamics, like free surface flows, or large boundary displacement.
* The lack of a mesh significantly simplifies the model implementation and its parallelization, even for
many-core architectures.
* SPH can be easily extended to a wide variety of fields, and hybridized with some other models, as discussed in
Modelling Physics.
* As discussed in section on
weakly compressible SPH, the method has great conservation features.
* The computational cost of SPH simulations per number of particles is significantly less than the cost of grid-based simulations per number of cells when the metric of interest is related to fluid
density
Density (volumetric mass density or specific mass) is the substance's mass per unit of volume. The symbol most often used for density is ''ρ'' (the lower case Greek letter rho), although the Latin letter ''D'' can also be used. Mathematicall ...
(e.g., the
probability density function
In probability theory, a probability density function (PDF), or density of a continuous random variable, is a function whose value at any given sample (or point) in the sample space (the set of possible values taken by the random variable) c ...
of density fluctuations).
This is the case because in SPH the resolution is put where the matter is.
Limitations
* Setting boundary conditions in SPH such as inlets and outlets
and walls
is more difficult than with grid-based methods. In fact, it has been stated that "the treatment of boundary conditions is certainly one of the most difficult technical points of the SPH method".
This challenge is partly because in SPH the particles near the boundary change with time.
Nonetheless, wall boundary conditions for SPH are available
* The computational cost of SPH simulations per number of particles is significantly larger than the cost of grid-based simulations per number of cells when the metric of interest is not (directly) related to density (e.g., the kinetic-energy spectrum).
Therefore, overlooking issues of parallel
speedup
In computer architecture, speedup is a number that measures the relative performance of two systems processing the same problem. More technically, it is the improvement in speed of execution of a task executed on two similar architectures with d ...
, the simulation of constant-density flows (e.g., external
aerodynamics
Aerodynamics, from grc, ἀήρ ''aero'' (air) + grc, δυναμική (dynamics), is the study of the motion of air, particularly when affected by a solid object, such as an airplane wing. It involves topics covered in the field of fluid dyn ...
) is more efficient with grid-based methods than with SPH.
Examples
Fluid dynamics
Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics is being increasingly used to model
fluid motion as well. This is due to several benefits over traditional grid-based techniques. First, SPH guarantees conservation of mass without extra computation since the particles themselves represent mass. Second, SPH computes pressure from weighted contributions of neighboring particles rather than by solving linear systems of equations. Finally, unlike grid-based techniques, which must track fluid boundaries, SPH creates a free surface for two-phase interacting fluids directly since the particles represent the denser fluid (usually water) and empty space represents the lighter fluid (usually air). For these reasons, it is possible to simulate fluid motion using SPH in real time. However, both grid-based and SPH techniques still require the generation of renderable free surface geometry using a polygonization technique such as
metaballs
In computer graphics, metaballs are organic-looking ''n''-dimensional isosurfaces, characterised by their ability to meld together when in close proximity to create single, contiguous objects.
In solid modelling, polygon meshes are commonly ...
and
marching cubes
Marching cubes is a computer graphics algorithm, published in the 1987 SIGGRAPH proceedings by Lorensen and Cline, for extracting a polygonal mesh of an isosurface from a three-dimensional discrete scalar field (the elements of which are someti ...
,
point splatting, or 'carpet' visualization. For gas dynamics it is more appropriate to use the kernel function itself to produce a rendering of gas column density (e.g., as done in the SPLASH visualisation package).
One drawback over grid-based techniques is the need for large numbers of particles to produce simulations of equivalent resolution. In the typical implementation of both
uniform grids and SPH particle techniques, many
voxels or particles will be used to fill water volumes that are never rendered. However, accuracy can be significantly higher with sophisticated grid-based techniques, especially those coupled with particle methods (such as particle level sets), since it is easier to enforce the
incompressibility condition in these systems. SPH for
fluid simulation
Fluid animation refers to computer graphics techniques for generating realistic animations of fluids such as water and smoke. Fluid animations are typically focused on emulating the qualitative visual behavior of a fluid, with less emphasis plac ...
is being used increasingly in real-time animation and games where accuracy is not as critical as interactivity.
Recent work in SPH for fluid simulation has increased performance, accuracy, and areas of application:
* B. Solenthaler, 2009, develops Predictive-Corrective SPH (PCISPH) to allow for better incompressibility constraints
* M. Ihmsen et al., 2010, introduce boundary handling and adaptive time-stepping for PCISPH for accurate rigid body interactions
* K. Bodin et al., 2011, replace the standard equation of state pressure with a density constraint and apply a variational time integrator
* R. Hoetzlein, 2012, develops efficient GPU-based SPH for large scenes in Fluids v.3
* N. Akinci et al., 2012, introduce a versatile boundary handling and two-way SPH-rigid coupling technique that is completely based on hydrodynamic forces; the approach is applicable to different types of SPH solvers
* M. Macklin et al., 2013 simulates incompressible flows inside the Position Based Dynamics framework, for bigger timesteps
* N. Akinci et al., 2013, introduce a versatile surface tension and two-way fluid-solid adhesion technique that allows simulating a variety of interesting physical effects that are observed in reality
* J. Kyle and E. Terrell, 2013, apply SPH to Full-Film Lubrication
* A. Mahdavi and N. Talebbeydokhti, 2015, propose a hybrid algorithm for implementation of solid boundary condition and simulate flow over a sharp crested weir
* S. Tavakkol et al., 2016, develop curvSPH, which makes the horizontal and vertical size of particles independent and generates uniform mass distribution along curved boundaries
* W. Kostorz and A. Esmail-Yakas, 2020, propose a general, efficient and simple method for evaluating normalization factors near piecewise-planar boundaries
* Colagrossi et al., 2019, study flow around a cylinder close to a free-surface and compare with other techniques
Astrophysics
Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics's adaptive resolution, numerical conservation of physically conserved quantities, and ability to simulate phenomena covering many
orders of magnitude
An order of magnitude is an approximation of the logarithm of a value relative to some contextually understood reference value, usually 10, interpreted as the base of the logarithm and the representative of values of magnitude one. Logarithmic di ...
make it ideal for computations in
theoretical astrophysics.
Simulations of
galaxy formation
The study of galaxy formation and evolution is concerned with the processes that formed a heterogeneous universe from a homogeneous beginning, the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have gen ...
,
star formation
Star formation is the process by which dense regions within molecular clouds in interstellar space, sometimes referred to as "stellar nurseries" or "star-forming regions", collapse and form stars. As a branch of astronomy, star formation includ ...
,
stellar collisions,
supernovae
A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. It has the plural form supernovae or supernovas, and is abbreviated SN or SNe. This transient astronomical event occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when ...
and
meteor
A meteoroid () is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space.
Meteoroids are defined as objects significantly smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from grains to objects up to a meter wide. Objects smaller than this are classified as mic ...
impacts are some of the wide variety of astrophysical and cosmological uses of this method.
SPH is used to model hydrodynamic flows, including possible effects of
gravity
In physics, gravity () is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things with mass or energy. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the str ...
. Incorporating other astrophysical processes which may be important, such as
radiative transfer
Radiative transfer is the physical phenomenon of energy transfer in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The propagation of radiation through a medium is affected by absorption, emission, and scattering processes. The equation of radiative trans ...
and
magnetic fields
A magnetic field is a vector field that describes the magnetic influence on moving electric charges, electric currents, and magnetic materials. A moving charge in a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to its own velocity and to ...
is an active area of research in the astronomical community, and has had some limited success.
Solid mechanics
Libersky and Petschek
[
]
extended SPH to Solid Mechanics. The main advantage of SPH in this application is the possibility of dealing with larger local distortion than grid-based methods.
This feature has been exploited in many applications in Solid Mechanics: metal forming, impact, crack growth, fracture, fragmentation, etc.
Another important advantage of meshfree methods in general, and of SPH in particular, is that mesh dependence problems are naturally avoided given the meshfree nature of the method. In particular, mesh alignment is related to problems involving cracks and it is avoided in SPH due to the isotropic support of the kernel functions. However, classical SPH formulations suffer from tensile instabilities
and lack of consistency.
Over the past years, different corrections have been introduced to improve the accuracy of the SPH solution, leading to the
RKPM by Liu et al.
Randles and Libersky
[
]
and Johnson and Beissel
[
]
tried to solve the consistency problem in their study of impact phenomena.
Dyka et al.
and Randles and Libersky
introduced the stress-point integration into SPH and
Ted Belytschko et al.
showed that the stress-point technique removes the instability due to spurious singular modes, while tensile instabilities can be avoided by using a Lagrangian kernel. Many other recent studies can be found in the literature devoted to improve the convergence of the SPH method.
Recent improvements in understanding the convergence and stability of SPH have allowed for more widespread applications in Solid Mechanics. Other examples of applications and developments of the method include:
* Metal forming simulations.
* SPH-based method SPAM (Smoothed Particle Applied Mechanics) for impact fracture in solids by
William G. Hoover.
* Modified SPH (SPH/MLSPH) for fracture and fragmentation.
* Taylor-SPH (TSPH) for shock wave propagation in solids.
* Generalized coordinate SPH (GSPH) allocates particles inhomogeneously in the Cartesian coordinate system and arranges them via mapping in a generalized coordinate system in which the particles are aligned at a uniform spacing.
Numerical tools
Interpolations
The Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method works by dividing the fluid into a set of discrete moving elements
, referred to as particles. Their Lagrangian nature allows setting their position
by integration of their velocity
as:
:
These particles interact through a
kernel function In operator theory, a branch of mathematics, a positive-definite kernel is a generalization of a positive-definite function or a positive-definite matrix. It was first introduced by James Mercer in the early 20th century, in the context of solving ...
with characteristic radius known as the "smoothing length", typically represented in equations by
. This means that the physical quantity of any particle can be obtained by summing the relevant properties of all the particles that lie within the range of the kernel, the latter being used as a weighting function
. This can be understood in two steps. First an arbitrary field
is written as a convolution with
:
:
The error in making the above approximation is order
. Secondly, the integral is approximated using a Riemann summation over the particles:
:
where the summation over
includes all particles in the simulation.
is the
volume
Volume is a measure of occupied three-dimensional space. It is often quantified numerically using SI derived units (such as the cubic metre and litre) or by various imperial or US customary units (such as the gallon, quart, cubic inch). Th ...
of particle
,
is the value of the quantity
for particle
and
denotes position. For example, the density
of particle
can be expressed as:
:
where
denotes the particle mass and
the particle density, while
is a short notation for
. The error done in approximating the integral by a discrete sum depends on
, on the particle size (i.e.
,
being the space dimension), and on the particle arrangement in space. The latter effect is still poorly known.
Kernel functions commonly used include the
Gaussian function
In mathematics, a Gaussian function, often simply referred to as a Gaussian, is a function of the base form
f(x) = \exp (-x^2)
and with parametric extension
f(x) = a \exp\left( -\frac \right)
for arbitrary real constants , and non-zero . It i ...
, the
quintic spline and the Wendland
kernel. The latter two kernels are compactly supported (unlike the Gaussian, where there is a small contribution at any finite distance away), with support proportional to
. This has the advantage of saving computational effort by not including the relatively minor contributions from distant particles.
Although the size of the smoothing length can be fixed in both
space
Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually con ...
and
time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, t ...
, this does not take advantage of the full power of SPH. By assigning each particle its own smoothing length and allowing it to vary with time, the resolution of a simulation can be made to automatically adapt itself depending on local conditions. For example, in a very dense region where many particles are close together, the smoothing length can be made relatively short, yielding high spatial resolution. Conversely, in low-density regions where individual particles are far apart and the resolution is low, the smoothing length can be increased, optimising the computation for the regions of interest.
Discretization of governing equations
For particles of constant mass, differentiating the interpolated density
with respect to time yields
:
where
is the gradient of
with respect to
. Comparing this equation with the
continuity equation
A continuity equation or transport equation is an equation that describes the transport of some quantity. It is particularly simple and powerful when applied to a conserved quantity, but it can be generalized to apply to any extensive quantity. ...
in the
Lagrangian
Lagrangian may refer to:
Mathematics
* Lagrangian function, used to solve constrained minimization problems in optimization theory; see Lagrange multiplier
** Lagrangian relaxation, the method of approximating a difficult constrained problem with ...
description (using
material derivative
In continuum mechanics, the material derivative describes the time rate of change of some physical quantity (like heat or momentum) of a material element that is subjected to a space-and-time-dependent macroscopic velocity field. The material de ...
s),
:
it is apparent that its right-hand side is an approximation of
; hence one defines a discrete divergence operator as follows:
:
This operator gives an SPH approximation of
at the particle
for a given set of particles with given masses
, positions
and velocities
.
The other important equation for a compressible inviscid fluid is the
Euler equation
200px, Leonhard Euler (1707–1783)
In mathematics and physics, many topics are named in honor of Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), who made many important discoveries and innovations. Many of these items named after Euler includ ...
for momentum balance:
:
Similarly to continuity, the task is to define a discrete gradient operator in order to write
:
One choice is
:
which has the property of being skew-adjoint with the divergence operator above, in the sense that
:
this being a discrete version of the continuum identity
:
This property leads to nice conservation properties.
Notice also that this choice leads to a symmetric divergence operator and antisymmetric gradient. Although there are several ways of discretizing the pressure gradient in the Euler equations, the above antisymmetric form is the most acknowledged one. It supports strict conservation of linear and angular momentum. This means that a force that is exerted on particle
by particle
equals the one that is exerted on particle
by particle
including the sign change of the effective direction, thanks to the antisymmetry property
.
Nevertheless, other operators have been proposed, which may perform better numerically or physically.
For instance, one drawback of these operators is that while the divergence
is zero-order consistent (i.e. yields zero when applied to a constant vector field), it can be seen that the gradient
is not. Several techniques have been proposed to circumvent this issue, leading to renormalized operators (see e.g.).
Variational principle
The above SPH governing equations can be derived from a
least action principle
The stationary-action principle – also known as the principle of least action – is a variational principle that, when applied to the ''action'' of a mechanical system, yields the equations of motion for that system. The principle states that ...
, starting from the
Lagrangian
Lagrangian may refer to:
Mathematics
* Lagrangian function, used to solve constrained minimization problems in optimization theory; see Lagrange multiplier
** Lagrangian relaxation, the method of approximating a difficult constrained problem with ...
of a particle system:
:
,
where
is the particle specific
internal energy
The internal energy of a thermodynamic system is the total energy contained within it. It is the energy necessary to create or prepare the system in its given internal state, and includes the contributions of potential energy and internal kinet ...
. The
Euler–Lagrange equation
In the calculus of variations and classical mechanics, the Euler–Lagrange equations are a system of second-order ordinary differential equations whose solutions are stationary points of the given action functional. The equations were discovered ...
of variational mechanics reads, for each particle:
:
When applied to the above Lagrangian, it gives the following momentum equation:
:
where the chain rule has been used, since
depends on
, and the latter, on the position of the particles.
Using the thermodynamic property
we may write
:
Pluging the SPH density interpolation and differentiating explicitly
leads to
:
which is the SPH momentum equation already mentioned, where we recognize the
operator. This explains why linear momentum is conserved, and allows conservation of angular momentum and energy to be conserved as well.
Time integration
From the work done in the 80's and 90's on numerical integration of point-like particles in large accelerators, appropriate time integrators have been developed with accurate conservation properties on the long term; they are called
symplectic integrator In mathematics, a symplectic integrator (SI) is a numerical integration scheme for Hamiltonian systems. Symplectic integrators form the subclass of geometric integrators which, by definition, are canonical transformations. They are widely used in ...
s. The most popular in the SPH literature is the
leapfrog
Leapfrog is a children's game in which players vault over each other's stooped backs.
History
Games of this sort have been called by this name since at least the late sixteenth century.below
Below may refer to:
*Earth
* Ground (disambiguation)
* Soil
* Floor
* Bottom (disambiguation)
* Less than
*Temperatures below freezing
* Hell or underworld
People with the surname
* Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general
* Fr ...
for more details).
Symplectic schemes are conservative but explicit, thus their numerical stability requires stability conditions, analogous to the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition (see
below
Below may refer to:
*Earth
* Ground (disambiguation)
* Soil
* Floor
* Bottom (disambiguation)
* Less than
*Temperatures below freezing
* Hell or underworld
People with the surname
* Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general
* Fr ...
).
Boundary techniques
In case the SPH convolution shall be practiced close to a boundary, i.e. closer than , then the integral support is truncated. Indeed, when the convolution is affected by a boundary, the convolution shall be split in 2 integrals,
:
where is the compact support ball centered at , with radius , and denotes the part of the compact support inside the computational domain, . Hence, imposing boundary conditions in SPH is completely based on approximating the second integral on the right hand side. The same can be of course applied to the differential operators computation,
:
Several techniques has been introduced in the past to model boundaries in SPH.
Integral neglect

The most straightforward boundary model is neglecting the integral,
:
such that just the bulk interactions are taken into account,
:
This is a popular approach when free-surface is considered in monophase simulations.
[
]
The main benefit of this boundary condition is its obvious simplicity. However, several consistency issues shall be considered when this boundary technique is applied.
That's in fact a heavy limitation on its potential applications.
Fluid Extension

Probably the most popular methodology, or at least the most traditional one, to impose boundary conditions in SPH, is Fluid Extension technique. Such technique is based on populating the compact support across the boundary with so-called ghost particles, conveniently imposing their field values.
[
]
Along this line, the
integral neglect methodology can be considered as a particular case of fluid extensions, where the field, , vanish outside the computational domain.
The main benefit of this methodology is the simplicity, provided that the boundary contribution is computed as part of the bulk interactions. Also, this methodology has been deeply analyzed in the literature.
[
][
]
On the other hand, deploying ghost particles in the truncated domain is not a trivial task, such that modelling complex boundary shapes becomes cumbersome. The 2 most popular approaches to populate the empty domain with ghost particles are Mirrored-Particles
[
] and Fixed-Particles.
Boundary Integral

The newest Boundary technique is the Boundary Integral methodology.
In this methodology, the empty volume integral is replaced by a surface integral, and a renormalization:
:
:
with the normal of the generic ''j''-th boundary element. The surface term can be also solved considering a semi-analytic expression.
Modelling physics
Hydrodynamics
Weakly compressible approach
Another way to determine the density is based on the SPH smoothing operator itself. Therefore, the density is estimated from the particle distribution utilizing the SPH
interpolation
In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points.
In engineering and science, one often has ...
. To overcome undesired errors at the free surface through kernel truncation, the density formulation can again be integrated in time.
The weakly compressible SPH in fluid dynamics is based on the discretization of the
Navier–Stokes equations
In physics, the Navier–Stokes equations ( ) are partial differential equations which describe the motion of viscous fluid substances, named after French engineer and physicist Claude-Louis Navier and Anglo-Irish physicist and mathematician G ...
or
Euler equations for compressible fluids. To close the system, an appropriate
equation of state
In physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics, an equation of state is a thermodynamic equation relating state variables, which describe the state of matter under a given set of physical conditions, such as pressure, volume, temperature, or intern ...
is utilized to link pressure
and density
. Generally, the so-called
Cole equation
(sometimes mistakenly referred to as the "
Tait equation
In fluid mechanics, the Tait equation is an equation of state, used to relate liquid density to hydrostatic pressure. The equation was originally published by Peter Guthrie Tait in 1888 in the form
:
\frac = \frac
where P is the hydrostat ...
") is used in SPH. It reads
:
where
is the reference density and
the
speed of sound
The speed of sound is the distance travelled per unit of time by a sound wave as it propagates through an elastic medium. At , the speed of sound in air is about , or one kilometre in or one mile in . It depends strongly on temperature as ...
. For water,
is commonly used. The background pressure
is added to avoid negative pressure values.
Real nearly incompressible fluids such as water are characterized by very high speed of sounds of the order
. Hence, pressure information travels fast compared to the actual bulk flow, which leads to very small Mach numbers
. The momentum equation leads to the following relation:
:
where
is the density change and
the velocity vector.
In practice a value of c smaller than the real one is adopted to avoid time steps too small in the time integration scheme. Generally a numerical speed of sound is adopted such that density variation smaller than 1% are allowed. This is the so-called weak-compressibility assumption.
This corresponds to a
Mach number
Mach number (M or Ma) (; ) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound.
It is named after the Moravian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.
: \mathrm = \ ...
smaller than 0.1, which implies:
:
where the maximum velocity
needs to be estimated, for e.g. by Torricelli's law or an educated guess. Since only small density variations occur, a linear equation of state can be adopted:
:
Usually the weakly-compressible schemes are affected by a high-frequency spurious noise on the pressure and density fields.
This phenomenon is caused by the nonlinear interaction of acoustic waves and by fact that the scheme is explicit in time and centered in space
.
Through the years, several techniques have been proposed to get rid of this problem. They can be classified in three different groups:
# the schemes that adopt density filters,
# the models that add a diffusive term in the continuity equation,
# the schemes that employ Riemann solvers to model the particle interaction.
= Density filter technique
=
The schemes of the first group apply a filter directly on the density field to remove the spurious numerical noise. The most used filters are the MLS (moving least squares) and the Shepard filter
which can be applied at each time step or every n time steps. The more frequent is the use of the filtering procedure, the more regular density and pressure fields are obtained. On the other hand, this leads to an increase of the computational costs. In long time simulations, the use of the filtering procedure may lead to the disruption of the hydrostatic pressure component and to an inconsistency between the global volume of fluid and the density field. Further, it does not ensure the enforcement of the dynamic free-surface boundary condition.
= Diffusive term technique
=
A different way to smooth out the density and pressure field is to add a diffusive term inside the continuity equation (group 2) :
:
The first schemes that adopted such an approach were described in Ferrari
and in Molteni
where the diffusive term was modeled as a Laplacian of the density field. A similar approach was also used in Fatehi and Manzari
.

In Antuono et al.
a correction to the diffusive term of Molteni
was proposed to remove some inconsistencies close to the free-surface. In this case the adopted diffusive term is equivalent to a high-order differential operator on the density field.
The scheme is called δ-SPH and preserves all the conservation properties of the SPH without diffusion (e.g., linear and angular momenta, total energy,
see
) along with a smooth and regular representation of the density and pressure fields.
In the third group there are those SPH schemes which employ numerical fluxes obtained through Riemann solvers to model the particle interactions.
= Riemann solver technique
=

For an SPH method based on Riemann solvers, an inter-particle Riemann problem is constructed along a unit vector
pointing form particle
to particle
. In this Riemann problem the initial left and right states are on particles
and
, respectively. The
and
states are
The solution of the Riemann problem results in three waves emanating from the discontinuity. Two waves, which can be shock or rarefaction wave, traveling with the smallest or largest wave speed. The middle wave is always a contact discontinuity and separates two intermediate states, denoted by
and
. By assuming that the intermediate state satisfies
and
, a linearized Riemann solver for smooth flows or with only moderately strong shocks can be written as
where
and
are inter-particle averages. With the solution of the Riemann problem, i.e.
and
, the discretization of the SPH method is
where
. This indicates that the inter-particle average velocity and pressure are simply replaced by the solution of the Riemann problem. By comparing both it can be seen that the intermediate velocity and pressure from the inter-particle averages amount to implicit dissipation, i.e. density regularization and numerical viscosity, respectively.
Since the above discretization is very dissipative a straightforward modification is to apply a limiter to decrease the implicit numerical dissipations introduced by limiting the intermediate pressure by
where the limiter is defined as
Note that
ensures that there is no dissipation when the fluid is under the action of an expansion wave, i.e.
, and that the parameter
, is used to modulate dissipation when the fluid is under the action of a compression wave, i.e.
. Numerical experiments found the
is generally effective. Also note that the dissipation introduced by the intermediate velocity is not limited.
Incompressible approach
Viscosity modelling
In general, the description of hydrodynamic flows require a convenient treatment of diffusive processes to model the
viscosity
The viscosity of a fluid is a measure of its resistance to deformation at a given rate. For liquids, it corresponds to the informal concept of "thickness": for example, syrup has a higher viscosity than water.
Viscosity quantifies the inte ...
in the
Navier–Stokes equations
In physics, the Navier–Stokes equations ( ) are partial differential equations which describe the motion of viscous fluid substances, named after French engineer and physicist Claude-Louis Navier and Anglo-Irish physicist and mathematician G ...
. It needs special consideration because it involves the
Laplacian
In mathematics, the Laplace operator or Laplacian is a differential operator given by the divergence of the gradient of a scalar function on Euclidean space. It is usually denoted by the symbols \nabla\cdot\nabla, \nabla^2 (where \nabla is ...
differential operator. Since the direct computation does not provide satisfactory results, several approaches to model the diffusion have been proposed.
* Artificial viscosity
Introduced by Monaghan and Gingold
the artificial viscosity was used to deal with high
Mach number
Mach number (M or Ma) (; ) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound.
It is named after the Moravian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.
: \mathrm = \ ...
fluid flows. It reads
:
Here,
is controlling a volume viscosity while
acts similar to the Neumann Richtmeyr artificial viscosity. The
is defined by
:
The artificial viscosity also has shown to improve the overall stability of general flow simulations. Therefore, it is applied to inviscid problems in the following form
:
It is possible to not only stabilize inviscid simulations but also to model the physical viscosity by this approach. To do so
:
is substituted in the equation above, where
is the number of spartial dimensions of the model. This approach introduces the bulk viscosity
.
* Morris
For low
Reynolds numbers the viscosity model by Morris
was proposed.
:
* LoShao
Additional physics
* Surface tension
* Heat transfer
* Turbulence
Multiphase extensions
Astrophysics
Often in astrophysics, one wishes to model self-gravity in addition to pure hydrodynamics. The particle-based nature of SPH makes it ideal to combine with a particle-based gravity solver, for instance
tree gravity code,
particle mesh, or
particle-particle particle-mesh.
Solid mechanics and fluid-structure interaction (FSI)
Total Lagrangian formulation for solid mechanics
To discretize the governing equations of solid dynamics, a correction matrix
[
]
[
]
is first introduced to reproducing rigid-body rotation as
where
stands for the gradient of the kernel function evaluated at the initial reference configuration.
Note that subscripts
and
are used to denote solid particles, and smoothing length
is identical to that in the discretization of fluid equations.
Using the initial configuration as the reference, the solid density is directly evaluated as
where
is the Jacobian determinant of deformation tensor
.
We can now discretize the momentum equation in the following form
where inter-particle averaged first Piola-Kirchhoff stress
is defined as
Also
and
correspond to the fluid pressure and viscous forces acting on the solid particle
, respectively.
Fluid-structure coupling
In fluid-structure coupling, the surrounding solid structure is behaving as a moving boundary for fluid, and the no-slip boundary condition is imposed at the fluid-structure interface. The interaction forces
and
acting on a fluid particle
, due to the presence of the neighboring solid particle
, can be obtained as
and
Here, the imaginary pressure
and velocity
are defined by
where
denotes the surface normal direction of the solid structure,
and the imaginary particle density
is calculated through the equation of state.
Accordingly, the interaction forces
and
acting on a solid particle
are given by
and
The anti-symmetric property of the derivative of the kernel function will ensure the momentum conservation for each pair of interacting particles
and
.
Others
The
discrete element method, used for simulating
granular material
A granular material is a conglomeration of discrete solid, macroscopic particles characterized by a loss of energy whenever the particles interact (the most common example would be friction when grains collide). The constituents that compose ...
s, is related to SPH.
Variants of the method
References
Further reading
* Hoover, W. G. (2006). Smooth Particle Applied Mechanics: The State of the Art, World Scientific.
Impact Modelling with SPHStellingwerf, R. F., Wingate, C. A., Memorie della Societa Astronomia Italiana, Vol. 65, p. 1117 (1994).
* Amada, T., Imura, M., Yasumuro, Y., Manabe, Y. and Chihara, K. (2004) Particle-based fluid simulation on GPU, in proceedings of ACM Workshop on General-purpose Computing on Graphics Processors (August, 2004, Los Angeles, California).
* Desbrun, M. and Cani, M-P. (1996). Smoothed Particles: a new paradigm for animating highly deformable bodies. In Proceedings of Eurographics Workshop on Computer Animation and Simulation (August 1996, Poitiers, France).
* Hegeman, K., Carr, N.A. and Miller, G.S.P. Particle-based fluid simulation on the GPU. In Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Science (Reading, UK, May 2006). Proceedings published as Lecture Notes in Computer Science v. 3994/2006 (Springer-Verlag).
* M. Kelager. (2006) Lagrangian Fluid Dynamics Using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, M. Kelagar (MS Thesis, Univ. Copenhagen).
* Kolb, A. and Cuntz, N. (2005). Dynamic particle coupling for GPU-based fluid simulation. In Proceedings of the 18th Symposium on Simulation Techniques (2005) pp. 722–727.
* Liu, G.R. and Liu, M.B. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics: a meshfree particle method. Singapore: World Scientific (2003).
* Monaghan, J.J. (1992). Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. (1992). 30 : 543–74.
* Muller, M., Charypar, D. and Gross, M. Particle-based Fluid Simulation for Interactive Applications, In Proceedings of Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation (2003), eds. D. Breen and M. Lin.
* Vesterlund, M. Simulation and Rendering of a Viscous Fluid Using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, (MS Thesis, Umea University, Sweden).
* Violeau, D., Fluid Mechanics and the SPH method. Oxford University Press (2012).
External links
First large simulation of star formation using SPHSPHERIC (SPH rEsearch and engineeRing International Community)ITVOis the web-site of The Italian Theoretical Virtual Observatory created to query a database of numerical simulation archive.
SPHC Image Gallerydepicts a wide variety of test cases, experimental validations, and commercial applications of the SPH code SPHC.
A derivation of the SPH model starting from Navier-Stokes equations
Software
Algodoo is a 2D simulation framework for education using SPHAQUAgpusphis the free (GPLv3) SPH of the researchers, by the researchers, for the researchers
dive solutionsis a commercial web-based SPH engineering software for CFD purposes
DualSPHysicsis a mostly open source SPH code based on SPHysics and using GPU computing. The open source components are available under the LGPL.
FLUIDS v.1is a simple, open source (Zlib), real-time 3D SPH implementation in C++ for liquids for CPU and GPU.
Fluidixis a GPU-based particle simulation API available from OneZero Software
*
GADGET
A gadget is a mechanical device or any ingenious article. Gadgets are sometimes referred to as '' gizmos''.
History
The etymology of the word is disputed. The word first appears as reference to an 18th-century tool in glassmaking that was develo ...
br>
is a freely available (
General Public License, GPL) code for cosmological N-body/SPH simulations
GPUSPHSPH simulator with viscosity (GPLv3)
Pasimodois a program package for particle-based simulation methods, e.g. SPH
LAMMPSis a massively parallel, open-source classical molecular dynamics code that can perform SPH simulations
Physics Abstraction Layeris an open source abstraction system that supports real time physics engines with SPH support
PreonLabis a commercial engineering software developed b
FIFTY2 Technologyimplementing an implicit SPH method
Puntois a freely available visualisation tool for particle simulations
pysphOpen Source Framework for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics in Python (New BSD License)
Py-SPHViewerOpen Source python visualisation tool for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations.
RealFlowCommercial SPH solver for the cinema industry.
RheoCubeis a commercial
SaaS
Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
SaaS is co ...
product b
Electric Ant Labthat couples
mesoscopic SPH models with microscale
MD simulations.
SimPARTIXis a commercial simulation package for SPH and
Discrete element method (DEM) simulations from Fraunhofer IWM
SPH-flowSPHERASPHinXsysis an open source multi-physics, multi-resolution SPH library. It provides C++ APIs for physical accurate simulation and aims to model coupled industrial dynamic systems including fluid, solid, multi-body dynamics and beyond.
SPHysicsis an open source SPH implementation in Fortran
SPLASHis an open source (GPL) visualisation tool for SPH simulations
SYMPLER A freeware SYMbolic ParticLE simulatoR from the University of Freiburg.
Nauticleis a general-purpose computational tool for particle-based numerical methods.
NDYNAMICSis a commercial fluid simulation software based on implicit SPH developed b
CENTROID LABcurrently used for internal/external flooding/nuclear/chemical engineering applications.
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Numerical differential equations
Computational fluid dynamics