Lagrangian Covector Fluid with Free Surface

TL;DR

This paper presents a new Lagrangian covector flow method for simulating incompressible fluids with free surfaces, improving robustness and accuracy in handling complex boundary conditions through a novel flow-map and path-integral approach.

Contribution

It introduces a covector flow-map based Lagrangian solver that effectively manages free surface boundary conditions using a decoupling mechanism and path integrals.

Findings

Enhanced robustness in free-surface fluid simulations.

Accurate transformation of projection problems into standard boundary condition Poisson problems.

Effective handling of complex boundary conditions in incompressible flow simulations.

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel Lagrangian fluid solver based on covector flow maps. We aim to address the challenges of establishing a robust flow-map solver for incompressible fluids under complex boundary conditions. Our key idea is to use particle trajectories to establish precise flow maps and tailor path integrals of physical quantities along these trajectories to reformulate the Poisson problem during the projection step. We devise a decoupling mechanism based on path-integral identities from flow-map theory. This mechanism integrates long-range flow maps for the main fluid body into a short-range projection framework, ensuring a robust treatment of free boundaries. We show that our method can effectively transform a long-range projection problem with integral boundaries into a Poisson problem with standard boundary conditions -- specifically, zero Dirichlet on the free surface and zero Neumann on solid boundaries. This transformation significantly enhances robustness and accuracy, extending the applicability of flow-map methods to complex free-surface problems.