Development of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Method for Modeling Active Nematics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-based smoothed particle hydrodynamics method to simulate active nematic flows, analyzing flow behavior, topological defects, and mixing, with a focus on the effects of activity and elastic constants.

Contribution

It presents a novel SPH-based active nematic flow solver implemented on GPU, enabling detailed analysis of flow dynamics, topological defects, and mixing behaviors in active nematics.

Findings

Higher activity increases chaos and mixing efficiency.

Elastic constant reduces chaotic behavior.

Spectrum analysis reveals scale-dependent energy distribution.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel GPU-based active nematic flow solver based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. Nematohydrodynamics equations are discretized using the SPH algorithm, and the periodic domain is enforced using the periodic ghost boundary condition. Flow behavior, nematic ordering, topological defects, vorticity correlation is calculated and discussed in detail. Due to the high particle resolution, the spectrum of the kinetic energy with respect to the wavenumber is calculated, and its slope a the different length scales discussed. To exploit the SPH capabilities, pathlines of nematic particles are evaluated during the simulation. Finally, the mixing behavior of the active nematics is calculated as well and described qualitatively. The effects of two important parameters, namely, activity and elastic constant are investigated. It is shown that the activity intensifies the chaotic nature of the active nematic by increasing the pathline and mixing efficiency, while the elastic constant behaves oppositely.