A geometric formulation of the Shepard renormalization factor

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric approach to accurately compute the Shepard renormalization factor at boundaries in SPH simulations, improving boundary condition treatment and extending to 3D geometries.

Contribution

A novel geometric formulation for the Shepard renormalization factor that enhances boundary operator consistency in SPH methods, applicable to both 2D and 3D cases.

Findings

Accurately computes Shepard factor for various planar geometries.

Effectively handles free surfaces and boundary conditions.

Extends methodology to 3D geometries with minimal computational overhead.

Abstract

The correct treatment of boundary conditions is a key step in the development of the SPH method. The SPH community has to face several challenges in this regard - in particular, a primordial aspect for any boundary formulation is to ensure the consistency of the operators in presence of boundaries and free surfaces. A new implementation is proposed, based on the existing numerical boundary integrals formulation. A new kernel expression is developed to compute the Shepard renormalization factor at the boundary purely as a function of the geometry. In order to evaluate this factor, the resulting expression is split into numerical and analytical parts, which allows accurately computing the Shepard factor. The new expression is satisfactorily tested for different planar geometries, showing that problems featuring free surfaces and boundaries are solved. The methodology is also extended to 3-D geometries without great increase in computational cost.