Pressure Boundaries for Implicit Incompressible SPH

Abstract

Implicit incompressible SPH (IISPH) solves a pressure Poisson equation (PPE). While the solution of the PPE provides pressure at fluid samples, the embedded boundary handling does not compute pressure at boundary samples. Instead, IISPH uses various approximations to remedy this deficiency. In this article, we illustrate the issues of these IISPH approximations. We particularly derive Pressure Boundaries, a novel boundary handling that overcomes previous IISPH issues by the computation of physically meaningful pressure values at boundary samples. This is basically achieved with an extended PPE. We provide a detailed description of the approach that focuses on additional technical challenges due to the incorporation of boundary samples into the PPE. We therefore use volume-centric SPH discretizations instead of typically used density-centric ones. We further analyze the properties of the proposed boundary handling and compare it to the previous IISPH boundary handling. In addition to the fact that the proposed boundary handling provides physically meaningful pressure and pressure gradients at boundary samples, we show further benefits, such as reduced pressure oscillations, improved solver convergence, and larger possible time steps. The memory footprint of fluid samples is reduced and performance gain factors of up to five compared to IISPH are presented.