A Vortex Method for Bi-phasic Fluids Interacting with Rigid Bodies

We present an accurate Lagrangian method based on vortex particles, level-sets, and immersed boundary methods, for animating the interplay between two fluids and rigid solids. We show that a vortex method is a good choice for simulating bi-phase flow, such as liquid and gas, with a good level of realism. Vortex particles are localized at the interfaces between the two fluids and within the regions of high turbulence. We gain local precision and efficiency from the stable advection permitted by the vorticity formulation. Moreover, our numerical method straightforwardly solves the two-way coupling problem between the fluids and animated rigid solids. This new approach is validated through numerical comparisons with reference experiments from the computational fluid community. We also show that the visually appealing results obtained in the CG community can be reproduced with increased efficiency and an easier implementation

Fast SPH simulation for gaseous fluids

This paper presents a fast smoothed particle hydro-dynamics (SPH) simulation approach for gaseous fluids. Unlike previous SPH gas simulators, which solve the transparent air flow in a fixed simulation domain, the proposed approach directly solves the visible gas without involving the transparent air. By compensating the density and force calculation for the visible gas particles, we completely avoid the need of computational cost on ambient air particles in previous approaches. This allows the computational resources to be exclusively focused on the visible gas, leading to significant performance improvement of SPH gas simulation. The proposed approach is at least ten times faster than the standard SPH gas simulation strategy and is able to reduce the total particle number by 25–400 times in large open scenes. The proposed approach also enables fast SPH simulation of complex scenes involving liquid–gas transition, such as boiling and evaporation. A particle splitting and merging scheme is proposed to handle the degraded resolution in liquid–gas phase transition. Various examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach

DESIGN, MODELING, AND CONTROL OF SOFT DYNAMIC SYSTEMS

Soft physical systems, be they elastic bodies, fluids, and compliant-bodied creatures, are ubiquitous in nature. Modeling and simulation of these systems with computer algorithms enable the creation of visually appealing animations, automated fabrication paradigms, and novel user interfaces and control mechanics to assist designers and engineers to develop new soft machines. This thesis develops computational methods to address the challenges emerged during the automation of the design, modeling, and control workflow supporting various soft dynamic systems. On the design/control side, we present a sketch-based design interface to enable non-expert users to design soft multicopters. Our system is endorsed by a data-driven algorithm to generate system identification and control policies given a novel shape prototype and rotor configurations. We show that our interactive system can automate the workflow of different soft multicopters\u27 design, simulation, and control with human designers involved in the loop. On the modeling side, we study the physical behaviors of fluidic systems from a local, collective perspective. We develop a prior-embedded graph network to uncover the local constraint relations underpinning a collective dynamic system such as particle fluid. We also proposed a simulation algorithm to model vortex dynamics with locally interacting Lagrangian elements. We demonstrate the efficacy of the two systems by learning, simulating and visualizing complicated dynamics of incompressible fluid

Turbulent Details Simulation for SPH Fluids via Vorticity Refinement

A major issue in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) approaches is the numerical dissipation during the projection process, especially under coarse discretizations. High-frequency details, such as turbulence and vortices, are smoothed out, leading to unrealistic results. To address this issue, we introduce a Vorticity Refinement (VR) solver for SPH fluids with negligible computational overhead. In this method, the numerical dissipation of the vorticity field is recovered by the difference between the theoretical and the actual vorticity, so as to enhance turbulence details. Instead of solving the Biot-Savart integrals, a stream function, which is easier and more efficient to solve, is used to relate the vorticity field to the velocity field. We obtain turbulence effects of different intensity levels by changing an adjustable parameter. Since the vorticity field is enhanced according to the curl field, our method can not only amplify existing vortices, but also capture additional turbulence. Our VR solver is straightforward to implement and can be easily integrated into existing SPH methods

Generation of Adaptive Streak Surfaces Using Moving Least Squares

We introduce a novel method for the generation of fully adaptive streak surfaces in time-varying flow fields based on particle advection and adaptive mesh refinement. Moving least squares approximation plays an important role in multiple stages of the proposed algorithm, which adaptively refines the surface based on curvature approximation and circumradius properties of the underlying Delaunay mesh. We utilize the grid-less Moving Least Squares approximation method for both curvature and surface estimation as well as vector field evaluation during particle advection. Delaunay properties of the surface triangulation are guaranteed by edge flipping operations on the progressive surface mesh. The results of this work illustrate the benefit of adaptivity techniques to streak surface generation and provide the means for a qualitative analysis of the presented approach