Profile
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Lukas Westhofen, M.Sc. |
Publications
A comparison of linear consistent correction methods for first-order SPH derivatives

A well-known issue with the widely used Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method is the neighborhood deficiency. Near the surface, the SPH interpolant fails to accurately capture the underlying fields due to a lack of neighboring particles. These errors may introduce ghost forces or other visual artifacts into the simulation.
In this work we investigate three different popular methods to correct the first-order spatial derivative SPH operators up to linear accuracy, namely the Kernel Gradient Correction (KGC), Moving Least Squares (MLS) and Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (RKPM). We provide a thorough, theoretical comparison in which we remark strong resemblance between the aforementioned methods. We support this by an analysis using synthetic test scenarios. Additionally, we apply the correction methods in simulations with boundary handling, viscosity, surface tension, vorticity and elastic solids to showcase the reduction or elimination of common numerical artifacts like ghost forces. Lastly, we show that incorporating the correction algorithms in a state-of-the-art SPH solver only incurs a negligible reduction in computational performance.
» Show BibTeX
@article{WJB23,
author = {Westhofen, Lukas and Jeske, Stefan and Bender, Jan},
title = {A Comparison of Linear Consistent Correction Methods for First-Order SPH Derivatives},
year = {2023},
issue_date = {August 2023},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
volume = {6},
number = {3},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3606933},
doi = {10.1145/3606933},
journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SCA)},
month = {aug},
articleno = {48},
numpages = {20}
}
Consistent SPH Rigid-Fluid Coupling

A common way to handle boundaries in SPH fluid simulations is to sample the surface of the boundary geometry using particles. These boundary particles are assigned the same properties as the fluid particles and are considered in the pressure force computation to avoid a penetration of the boundary. However, the pressure solver requires a pressure value for each particle. These are typically not computed for the boundary particles due to the computational overhead. Therefore, several strategies have been investigated in previous works to obtain boundary pressure values. A popular, simple technique is pressure mirroring, which mirrors the values from the fluid particles. This method is efficient, but may cause visual artifacts. More complex approaches like pressure extrapolation aim to avoid these artifacts at the cost of computation time.
We introduce a constraint-based derivation of Divergence-Free SPH (DFSPH) --- a common state-of-the-art pressure solver. This derivation gives us new insights on how to integrate boundary particles in the pressure solve without the need of explicitly computing boundary pressure values. This yields a more elegant formulation of the pressure solver that avoids the aforementioned problems.
» Show BibTeX
@inproceedings {BWJ23,
booktitle = {Vision, Modeling, and Visualization},
title = {{Consistent SPH Rigid-Fluid Coupling}},
author = {Jan Bender and Lukas Westhofen and Stefan Rhys Jeske},
year = {2023},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association}
}
Fast Octree Neighborhood Search for SPH Simulations

We present a new octree-based neighborhood search method for SPH simulation. A speedup of up to 1.9x is observed in comparison to state-of-the-art methods which rely on uniform grids. While our method focuses on maximizing performance in fixed-radius SPH simulations, we show that it can also be used in scenarios where the particle support radius is not constant thanks to the adaptive nature of the octree acceleration structure.
Neighborhood search methods typically consist of an acceleration structure that prunes the space of possible particle neighbor pairs, followed by direct distance comparisons between the remaining particle pairs. Previous works have focused on minimizing the number of comparisons. However, in an effort to minimize the actual computation time, we find that distance comparisons exhibit very high throughput on modern CPUs. By permitting more comparisons than strictly necessary, the time spent on preparing and searching the acceleration structure can be reduced, yielding a net positive speedup. The choice of an octree acceleration structure, instead of the uniform grid typically used in fixed-radius methods, ensures balanced computational tasks. This benefits both parallelism and provides consistently high computational intensity for the distance comparisons. We present a detailed account of high-level considerations that, together with low-level decisions, enable high throughput for performance-critical parts of the algorithm.
Finally, we demonstrate the high performance of our algorithm on a number of large-scale fixed-radius SPH benchmarks and show in experiments with a support radius ratio up to 3 that our method is also effective in multi-resolution SPH simulations.
» Show BibTeX
@ARTICLE{ FWL+22,
author= {Jos{\'{e}} Antonio Fern{\'{a}}ndez-Fern{\'{a}}ndez and Lukas Westhofen and Fabian L{\"{o}}schner and Stefan Rhys Jeske and Andreas Longva and Jan Bender },
title= {{Fast Octree Neighborhood Search for SPH Simulations}},
year= {2022},
journal= {ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia)},
publisher= {ACM},
volume = {41},
number = {6},
pages= {13}
}