Solidification using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Abstract

An increasingly popular way to display fluids in multimedia is by generating physically-based fluid simulations. In the last couple of years hardware has finally been powerful enough to simulate particle-based fluid simulation techniques in real-time. Existing works provide basic fluid simulators but lack more advanced fluid aspects. Advanced aspects include temperature, phase transitions such as the freezing or melting of water. More advanced aspects are the interactions, such as heat diffusion and collisions, between fluids and complex objects ( i.e. terrain ). We propose extensions to the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics fluid simulation in order to achieve this functionality for the common fluid water. We attempt to retain the real-time nature of GPU-based SPH by extending an existing framework and by monitoring the performance impact for each extension. Our contributions include the addition of temperature to the simulated fluids and heat conduction to manipulate this temperature. We have added phase transitions which can adjust the physical state of the fluid as a result of the change of properties of the fluid. Finally we have added interaction between the fluid and an environment in order to more realistically simulate heat transfer. Our extensions make use of existing functionality in the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics fluid simulator, this way we can provide computationally heavy extensions with a minimal degradation of the performance.