Multi-phase Modelling of Violent Hydrodynamics using SPH

SPH is a relatively new, rapidly evolving Lagrangian meshless method that is currently being applied in a large variety of cases, ranging from astrophysics to nuclear engineering. However, most of these cases have been treated so far as single phase cases, therefore limiting both the accuracy of the method and the range of cases that can be solved and importantly the physics captured. However, several models have been developed in recent years, allowing SPH to model multi-phase flows. This study is mainly focused in two-phase flows that include the interaction of two fluids: air and water which have a large density ratio of 1:1000. Understanding the interactions between them is essential for a large number of engineering cases, such as wave breaking as shown in Figure 1, fuel tank sloshing and dam break. Two distinct test cases have been selected for this project, both including interactions between water and air. In order to model them, we have selected the model of Colagrossi and Landrini (2003), which, despite being fairly simple has been extensively tested by Rogers et al. (2009), producing sufficiently accurate results. Modelling and testing has been done so far in Fortran, but the focus will soon shift to GPU programming, as this will allow us to model cases in a fraction of the time that CPU programming requires, enabling us to target larger scale cases.