Material point method applied to multiphase flows

The particle-in-cell method (PIC), especially the latest version of it, the material point method (MPM), has shown significant advantage over the pure Lagrangian method or the pure Eulerian method in numerical simulations of problems involving large deformations. It avoids the mesh distortion and tangling issues associated with Lagrangian methods and the advection errors associated with Eulerian methods. Its application to multiphase flows or multi-material deformations, however, encounters a numerical difficulty of satisfying continuity requirement due to the inconsistence of the interpolation schemes used for different phases. It is shown in Section 3 that current methods of enforcing this requirement either leads to erroneous results or can cause significant accumulation of errors. In the present paper, a different numerical method is introduced to ensure that the continuity requirement is satisfied with an error consistent with the discretization error and will not grow beyond that during the time advancement in the calculation. This method is independent of physical models. Its numerical implementation is quite similar to the common method used in Eulerian calculations of multiphase flows. Examples calculated using this method are presented. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.