Category: Fluids

A Semi-Implicit Material Point Method for the Continuum Simulation of Granular Materials

Gilles Daviet, Florence Bertails-Descoubes

We present a new continuum-based method for the realistic simulation of large-scale free-flowing granular materials. We derive a compact model for the rheology of the material, which accounts for the exact nonsmooth Drucker-Prager yield criterion combined with a varying volume fraction. Thanks to a semi-implicit timestepping scheme and a careful spatial discretization of our rheology built upon the Material-Point Method, we are able to preserve at each time step the exact coupling between normal and tangential stresses, in a stable way. This contrasts with previous approaches which either regularize or linearize the yield criterion for implicit integration, leading to unrealistic behaviors or visible grid artifacts. Remarkably, our discrete problem turns out to be very similar to the discrete contact problem classically encountered in multibody dynamics, which allows us to leverage robust and efficient nonsmooth solvers from the literature. We validate our method by successfully capturing typical macroscopic features of some classical experiments, such as the discharge of a silo or the collapse of a granular column. Finally, we show that our method can be easily extended to accommodate more complex scenarios including twoway rigid body coupling as well as anisotropic materials.

A Semi-Implicit Material Point Method for the Continuum Simulation of Granular Materials

Surface-Only Liquids

Fang Da, David Hahn, Christopher Batty, Chris Wojtan, Eitan Grinspun

We propose a novel surface-only technique for simulating incompressible, inviscid and uniform-density liquids with surface tension in three dimensions. The liquid surface is captured by a triangle mesh on which a Lagrangian velocity field is stored. Because advection of the velocity field may violate the incompressibility condition, we devise an orthogonal projection technique to remove the divergence while requiring the evaluation of only two boundary integrals. The forces of surface tension, gravity, and solid contact are all treated by a boundary element solve, allowing us to perform detailed simulations of a wide range of liquid phenomena, including waterbells, droplet and jet collisions, fluid chains, and crown splashes.

Surface-Only Liquids

Drucker-Prager Elastoplasticity for Sand Animation

Gergely Klar, Theodore Gast, Andre Pradhana, Chuyuan Fu, Craig Schroeder, Chenfanfu Jiang, Joseph Teran

We simulate sand dynamics using an elastoplastic, continuum assumption. We demonstrate that the Drucker-Prager plastic flow model combined with a Hencky-strain-based hyperelasticity accurately recreates a wide range of visual sand phenomena with moderate computational expense. We use the Material Point Method (MPM) to discretize the governing equations for its natural treatment of contact, topological change and history dependent constitutive relations. The Drucker-Prager model naturally represents the frictional relation between shear and normal stresses through a yield stress criterion. We develop a stress projection algorithm used for enforcing this condition with a non-associative flow rule that works naturally with both implicit and explicit time integration. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on examples undergoing large deformation, collisions and topological changes necessary for producing modern visual effects.

Drucker-Prager Elastoplasticity for Sand Animation

Resolving Fluid Boundary Layers with Particle Strength Exchange and Weak Adaptivity

Xinxin Zhang, Minchen Li, Robert Bridson

Most fluid scenarios in graphics have a high Reynolds number, where viscosity is dominated by inertial effects, thus most solvers drop viscosity altogether: numerical damping from coarse grids is generally stronger than physical viscosity while resembling it in character. However, viscosity remains crucial near solid boundaries, in the boundary layer, to a large extent determining the look of the flow as a function of Reynolds number. Typical graphics simulations do not resolve boundary layer dynamics, so their look is determined mostly by numerical errors with the given grid size and time step, rather than physical parameters. We introduce two complementary techniques to capture boundary layer dynamics, bringing more physical control and predictability. We extend the FLIP particle-grid method with viscous particle strength exchange[Rivoalen and Huberson 2001] to better transfer momentum at solid boundaries, dubbed VFLIP. We also introduce Weakly Higher Resolution Regional Projection (WHIRP), a cheap and simple way to increase grid resolution where important by overlaying high resolution grids on the global coarse grid.

Resolving Fluid Boundary Layers with Particle Strength Exchange and Weak Adaptivity

Ebb: A DSL for Physical Simulation on CPUs and GPUs

Gilbert Bernstein, Chinmayee Shah, Crystal Lemire, Zachery DeVito, Matthew Fisher, Philip Levis, Pat Hanrahan

Designing programming environments for physical simulation is challenging because simulations rely on diverse algorithms and geometric domains. These challenges are compounded when we try to run efficiently on heterogeneous parallel architectures. We present Ebb, a domain-specific language (DSL) for simulation, that runs efficiently on both CPUs and GPUs. Unlike previous DSLs, Ebb uses a three-layer architecture to separate (1) simulation code, (2) definition of data structures for geometric domains, and (3) runtimes supporting parallel architectures. Different geometric domains are implemented as libraries that use a common, unified, relational data model. By structuring the simulation framework in this way, programmers implementing simulations can focus on the physics and algorithms for each simulation without worrying about their implementation on parallel computers. Because the geometric domain libraries are all implemented using a common runtime based on relations, new geometric domains can be added as needed, without specifying the details of memory management, mapping to different parallel architectures, or having to expand the runtime’s interface. We evaluate Ebb by comparing it to several widely used simulations, demonstrating comparable performance to hand-written GPU code where available, and surpassing existing CPU performance optimizations by up to 9x when no GPU code exists.

Ebb: A DSL for Physical Simulation on CPUs and GPUs

Liquid boundaries for implicit incompressible SPH

Jens Cornelis, Markus Ihmsen, Andreas Peer, Matthias Teschner

We propose a novel unified particle representation for fluids and solid boundaries in Implicit Incompressible SPH (IISPH). In contrast to existing particle representations, the proposed concept does not require a separate processing of fluid and boundary particles. On one hand, this results in a simplified solver implementation with improved efficiency. On the other hand, the unified fluid and boundary representation adds flexibility to IISPH which enables versatile effects. In particular, particles can now dynamically interchange their role between fluid and boundary which we therefore refer to as liquid boundary. The paper mainly focuses on the description of the unified representation and on the application of the concept to visual effects such as solidification and liquefaction. To support the realization of these effects, the concept of unified fluid and liquid boundary particles is extended to a third particle type, so-called candidate particles that are used in a transition phase between fluid and liquid boundaries.

Liquid boundaries for implicit incompressible SPH

A Practical Method for High-Resolution Embedded Liquid Surfaces

Ryan Goldade, Christopher Batty, Chris Wojtan

Combining high-resolution level set surface tracking with lower resolution physics is an inexpensive method for achieving highly detailed liquid animations. Unfortunately, the inherent resolution mismatch introduces several types of disturbing visual artifacts. We identify the primary sources of these artifacts and present simple, efficient, and practical solutions to address them. First, we propose an unconditionally stable filtering method that selectively removes sub-grid surface artifacts not seen by the fluid physics, while preserving fine detail in dynamic splashing regions. It provides comparable results to recent error-correction techniques at lower cost, without substepping, and with better scaling behavior. Second, we show how a modified narrow-band scheme can ensure accurate free surface boundary conditions in the presence of large resolution mismatches. Our scheme preserves the efficiency of the narrow-band methodology, while eliminating objectionable stairstep artifacts observed in prior work. Third, we demonstrate that the use of linear interpolation of velocity during advection of the high-resolution level set surface is responsible for visible grid-aligned kinks; we therefore advocate higher-order velocity interpolation, and show that it dramatically reduces this artifact. While these three contributions are orthogonal, our results demonstrate that taken together they efficiently address the dominant sources of visual artifacts arising with high-resolution embedded liquid surfaces; the proposed approach offers improved visual quality, a straightforward implementation, and substantially greater scalability than competing methods.

A Practical Method for High-Resolution Embedded Liquid Surfaces

Narrow Band FLIP for Liquid Simulations

Florian Ferstl, Ryoichi Ando, Chris Wojtan, Rudiger Westermann, Nils Thuerey

The Fluid Implicit Particle method (FLIP) for liquid simulations uses particles to reduce numerical dissipation and provide important visual cues for events like complex splashes and small-scale features near the liquid surface. Unfortunately, FLIP simulations can be computationally expensive, because they require a dense sampling of particles to fill the entire liquid volume. Furthermore, the vast majority of these FLIP particles contribute nothing to the fluid’s visual appearance, especially for larger volumes of liquid. We present a method that only uses FLIP particles within a narrow band of the liquid surface, while efficiently representing the remaining inner volume on a regular grid. We show that a naive realization of this idea introduces unstable and uncontrollable energy fluctuations, and we propose a novel coupling scheme between FLIP particles and regular grid which overcomes this problem. Our method drastically reduces the particle count and simulation times while yielding results that are nearly indistinguishable from regular FLIP simulations. Our approach is easy to integrate into any existing FLIP implementation.

Narrow Band FLIP for Liquid Simulations

Solving the Fluid Pressure Poisson Equation Using Multigrid—Evaluation and Improvements

Christian Dick, Marcus Rogowsky, Rüdiger Westermann

In many numerical simulations of fluids governed by the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, the pressure Poisson equation needs to be solved to enforce mass conservation. Multigrid solvers show excellent convergence in simple scenarios, yet they can converge slowly in domains where physically separated regions are combined at coarser scales. Moreover, existing multigrid solvers are tailored to specific discretizations of the pressure Poisson equation, and they cannot easily be adapted to other discretizations.
In this paper we analyze the convergence properties of existing multigrid solvers for the pressure Poisson equation in different simulation domains, and we show how to further improve the multigrid convergence rate by using a graph-based extension to determine the coarse grid hierarchy. The proposed multigrid solver is generic in that it can be applied to different kinds of discretizations of the pressure Poisson equation, by using solely the specification of the simulation domain and pre-assembled computational stencils. We analyze the proposed solver in combination with finite difference and finite volume discretizations of the pressure Poisson equation. Our evaluations show that, despite the common assumption, multigrid schemes can exploit their potential even in the most complicated simulation scenarios, yet this behavior is obtained at the price of higher memory consumption.

Solving the Fluid Pressure Poisson Equation Using Multigrid—Evaluation and Improvements

Implicit Incompressible SPH on the GPU

Prashant Goswami, André Eliasson, Pontus Franzén

This paper presents CUDA-based parallelization of implicit incompressible SPH (IISPH) on the GPU. Along with the detailed exposition of our implementation, we analyze various components involved for their costs. We show that our CUDA version achieves near linear scaling with the number of particles and is faster than the multi-core parallelized IISPH on the CPU. We also present a basic comparison of IISPH with the standard SPH on GPU.

Implicit Incompressible SPH on the GPU