An SPH Formulation for Incompressible Newtonian Free Surface Flows

Abstract

The meshless method Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is one of the primarily developed numerical methods in the meshless methods family. It has been proven to work well with problems of free surface fluid flows. For the purpose of this thesis, the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method and its current capabilities were studied. Using the obtained knowledge from the literature, a free surface fluid flow application was implemented in the framework of KRATOS multiphysics. Some well known benchmark problems were reproduced using the generated SPH solver. The algorithm's ability to catch the correct free surface evolution and obtain an accurate pressure distribution of free surface problems were analyzed. Furthermore, some programming aspects of coding for meshless methods were discussed from the computational workload point of view. Using the developed application, it was demonstrated that in order to create a generic SPH fluid solver that is able to model any type of fluid, some additional corrections must be applied to the SPH solution. These corrections, although being very convenient to obtain good particle tracking of the fluid motion, affect the pressure distribution of the flow excessively and make the weakly compressible SPH method untrusted for the pressure results of fluid flow problems.