Interlinked SPH Pressure Solvers for Strong Fluid-Rigid Coupling

Abstract

We present a strong fluid-rigid coupling for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) fluids and rigid bodies with particle-sampled surfaces. The approach interlinks the iterative pressure update at fluid particles with a second SPH solver that computes artificial pressure at rigid-body particles. The introduced SPH rigid-body solver models rigid-rigid contacts as artificial density deviations at rigid-body particles. The corresponding pressure is iteratively computed by solving a global formulation that is particularly useful for large numbers of rigid-rigid contacts. Compared to previous SPH coupling methods, the proposed concept stabilizes the fluid-rigid interface handling. It significantly reduces the computation times of SPH fluid simulations by enabling larger time steps. Performance gain factors of up to 58 compared to previous methods are presented. We illustrate the flexibility of the presented fluid-rigid coupling by integrating it into DFSPH, IISPH, and a recent SPH solver for highly viscous fluids. We further show its applicability to a recent SPH solver for elastic objects. Large scenarios with up to 90 M particles of various interacting materials and complex contact geometries with up to 90 k rigid-rigid contacts are shown. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our proposed rigid-body solver by comparing it to Bullet.