High-accuracy three-dimensional surface detection in smoothed particle hydrodynamics for free-surface flows

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel geometrical approach for high-accuracy detection of free-surface particles in 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics, improving precision and efficiency in complex free-surface flow simulations.

Contribution

It presents a new geometrical detection method and a semi-geometrical approach to reduce computational costs in free-surface particle identification.

Findings

Enhanced detection accuracy demonstrated on model problems

Reduced computational cost with semi-geometrical method

Robustness confirmed in complex flow scenarios

Abstract

In this study, we investigate high-accuracy three-dimensional surface detection in smoothed particle hydrodynamics for free-surface flows. A new geometrical method is first developed to enhance the accuracy of free-surface particle detection in complex flows. This method detects free-surface particles via continuous global scanning inside the sphere of a particle through a cone region whose vertex corresponds to the particle position. The particle is identified as a free-surface particle if there exists a cone region with no neighboring particles. Next, an efficient semi-geometrical method is proposed based on the geometrical method to reduce the computational cost. It consists of finding particles near the free surface via position divergence and then detecting these particles using the geometrical method to identify free-surface particles. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed method are demonstrated by performing tests on several model problems.