Continuum Foam: A Material Point Method for Shear-Dependent Flows

Abstract

© ACM, 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Yue, Y., Smith, B., Batty, C., Zheng, C., & Grinspun, E. (2015). Continuum Foam: A Material Point Method for Shear-Dependent Flows. Acm Transactions on Graphics, 34(5), 160. https://doi.org/10.1145/2751541We consider the simulation of dense foams composed of microscopic bubbles, such as shaving cream and whipped cream. We represent foam not as a collection of discrete bubbles, but instead as a continuum. We employ the material point method (MPM) to discretize a hyperelastic constitutive relation augmented with the Herschel-Bulkleymodel of non-Newtonian viscoplastic flow, which is known to closely approximate foam behavior. Since large shearing flows in foam can produce poor distributions of material points, a typical MPM implementation can produce non-physical internal holes in the continuum. To address these artifacts, we introduce a particle resampling method for MPM. In addition, we introduce an explicit tearing model to prevent regions from shearing into artificially thin, honey-like threads. We evaluate our method's efficacy by simulating a number of dense foams, and we validate our method by comparing to real-world footage of foam.This work was supported in part by the JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowshipsfor Research Abroad, NSF (Grants IIS-13-19483, CMMI-11-29917, CAREER-1453101), NSERC (Grant RGPIN-04360-2014), Intel, The Walt Disney Company, Autodesk, Side Effects, NVIDIA,Adobe, and The Foundry