Category: Fluids

Rene Winchenbach, Henrik Hockstetter, Andreas Kolb

In this paper we introduce a novel method to adaptive incompressible SPH simulations. Instead of using a scheme with a number of fixed particle sizes or levels, our approach allows continuous particle sizes. This enables us to define optimal particle masses with respect to, e.g., the distance to the fluid’s surface. A required change in mass due to the dynamics of the fluid is properly and stably handled by our scheme of mass redistribution. This includes temporally smooth changes in particle masses as well as sudden mass variations in regions of high flow dynamics. Our approach guarantees low spatial variations in particle size, which is a core property in order to achieve large adaptivity ratios for incompressible fluid simulations. Conceptually, our approach allows for infinite continuous adaptivity, practically we achieved adaptivity ratios up to 5 orders of magnitude, while still being mass preserving and numerically stable, yielding unprecedented vivid surface detail at comparably low computational cost and moderate particle counts.

Infinite Continuous Adaptivity for Incompressible SPH

Kiwon Um, Xiangyu Hu, Nils Thuerey

This paper proposes a novel framework to evaluate fluid simulation methods based on crowd-sourced user studies in order to robustly gather large numbers of opinions. The key idea for a robust and reliable evaluation is to use a reference video from a carefully selected real-world setup in the user study. By conducting a series of controlled user studies and comparing their evaluation results, we observe various factors that affect the perceptual evaluation. Our data show that the availability of a reference video makes the evaluation consistent. We introduce this approach for computing scores of simulation methods as visual accuracy metric. As an application of the proposed framework, a variety of popular simulation methods are evaluated.

Perceptual Evaluation of Liquid Simulation Methods

Mridul Aanjaneya, Ming Gao, Haixiang Liu, Christopher Batty and Eftychios Sifakis

We present an efficient and scalable octree-inspired fluid simulation framework with the flexibility to leverage adaptivity in any part of the computational domain, even when resolution transitions reach the free surface. Our methodology ensures symmetry, definiteness and second order accuracy of the discrete Poisson operator, and eliminates numerical and visual artifacts of prior octree schemes. This is achieved by adapting the operators acting on the octree’s simulation variables to reflect the structure and connectivity of a power diagram, which recovers primal-dual mesh orthogonality and eliminates problematic T-junction configurations. We show how such operators can be efficiently implemented using a pyramid of sparsely populated uniform grids, enhancing the regularity of operations and facilitating parallelization. A novel scheme is proposed for encoding the topology of the power diagram in the neighborhood of each octree cell, allowing us to locally reconstruct it on the fly via a lookup table, rather than resorting to costly explicit meshing. The pressure Poisson equation is solved via a highly efficient, matrix-free multigrid preconditioner for Conjugate Gradient, adapted to the power diagram discretization. We use another sparsely populated uniform grid for high resolution interface tracking with a narrow band level set representation. Using the recently introduced SPGrid data structure, sparse uniform grids in both the power diagram discretization and our narrow band level set can be compactly stored and efficiently updated via streaming operations. Additionally, we present enhancements to adaptive level set advection, velocity extrapolation, and the fast marching method for redistancing. Our overall framework gracefully accommodates the task of dynamically adapting the octree topology during simulation. We demonstrate end-to-end simulations of complex adaptive flows in irregularly shaped domains, with tens of millions of degrees of freedom.

Power Diagrams and Sparse Paged Grids for High Resolution Adaptive Liquids

Egor Larionov, Christopher Batty, Robert Bridson

We propose a novel unsteady Stokes solver for coupled viscous and pressure forces in grid-based liquid animation which yields greater accuracy and visual realism than previously achieved. Modern fluid simulators treat viscosity and pressure in separate solver stages, which reduces accuracy and yields incorrect free surface behavior. Our proposed implicit variational formulation of the Stokes problem leads to a symmetric positive definite linear system that gives properly coupled forces, provides unconditional stability, and treats difficult boundary conditions naturally through simple volume weights. Surface tension and moving solid boundaries are also easily incorporated. Qualitatively, we show that our method recovers the characteristic rope coiling instability of viscous liquids and preserves fine surface details, while previous grid-based schemes do not. Quantitatively, we demonstrate that our method is convergent through grid refinement studies on analytical problems in two dimensions. We conclude by offering practical guidelines for choosing an appropriate viscous solver, based on the scenario to be animated and the computational costs of different methods.

Variational Stokes: A Unified Pressure-Viscosity Solver for Accurate Viscous Liquids

Christoph Gissler, Stefan Band, Andreas Peer, Markus Ihmsen, Matthias Teschner

Computing the forces acting from a surrounding air phase onto an SPH free-surface fluid is challenging. For full multiphase simulations the computational overhead is significant and stability issues due to the high density ratio may arise. In contrast, the air-fluid interactions can be approximated efficiently by employing a drag equation. Here, for plausible effects, the parameterization is important but challenging. We present an approach to calculate the parameters of the used drag equation in a physically motivated way. We approximate the deformation and occlusion of particles to determine their drag coefficient and exposed surface area. The resulting effects are validated by comparing them to the results of a multiphase SPH simulation. We further show the practicality of our approach by combining it with different types of SPH solvers and by simulating multiple, complex scenes.

Approximate Air-Fluid Interactions for SPH

Stefan Band, Christoph Gissler, Matthias Teschner

The paper shows that the SPH boundary handling of Akinci et al. [AIA∗ 12] suffers from perceivable issues in planar regions due to deviations in the computed boundary normals and due to erroneous oscillations in the distance computation of fluid particles to the boundary. In order to resolve these issues, we propose a novel boundary handling that combines the SPH concept with Moving Least Squares. The proposed technique significantly improves the distance and normal computations in planar boundary regions, while its computational complexity is similar to Akinci’s approach. We embed the proposed boundary handling into Implicit Incompressible SPH in a hybrid setting where it is applied at planar boundaries, while Akinci’s technique is still being used for boundaries with complex shapes. Various benefits of the improved boundary handling are illustrated, in particular a reduced particle leakage and a reduced artificial boundary friction.

Moving Least Squares Boundaries for SPH Fluids

Andreas Peer, Matthias Teschner

Working with prescribed velocity gradients is a promising approach to efficiently and robustly simulate highly viscous SPH fluids. Such approaches allow to explicitly and independently process shear rate, spin, and expansion rate. This can be used to, e.g., avoid interferences between pressure and viscosity solvers. Another interesting aspect is the possibility to explicitly process the vorticity, e.g. to preserve the vorticity. In this context, this paper proposes a novel variant of the prescribed-gradient idea that handles vorticity in a physically motivated way. In contrast to a less appropriate vorticity preservation that has been used in a previous approach, vorticity is diffused. The paper illustrates the utility of the vorticity diffusion. Therefore, comparisons of the proposed vorticity diffusion with vorticity preservation and additionally with vorticity damping are presented. The paper further discusses the relation between prescribed velocity gradients and prescribed velocity Laplacians which improves the intuition behind the prescribed-gradient method for highly viscous SPH fluids. Finally, the paper discusses the relation of the proposed method to a physically correct implicit viscosity formulation.

Prescribed Velocity Gradients for Highly Viscous SPH Fluids with Vorticity Diffusion

Nils Thuerey

We present a novel method to interpolate smoke and liquid simulations in order to perform data-driven fluid simulations. Our approach calculates a dense space-time deformation using grid-based signed-distance functions of the inputs. A key advantage of this implicit Eulerian representation is that it allows us to use powerful techniques from the optical flow area. We employ a five-dimensional optical flow solve. In combination with a projection algorithm, and residual iterations, we achieve a robust matching of the inputs. Once the match is computed, arbitrary in between variants can be created very efficiently. To concatenate multiple long-range deformations, we propose a novel alignment technique. Our approach has numerous advantages, including automatic matches without user input, volumetric deformations that can be applied to details around the surface, and the inherent handling of topology changes. As a result, we can interpolate swirling smoke clouds, and splashing liquid simulations. We can even match and interpolate phenomena with fundamentally different physics: a drop of liquid, and a blob of heavy smoke.

Interpolations of Smoke and Liquid Simulations