Real-time fluid simulation with adaptive SPH

We present a new adaptive model for real-time fluid simulation based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) framework. Unlike traditional time-consuming SPH methods, our model can simulate fluid at a considerably faster speed without losing realism. In our model, we first introduce the non-uniform particle system and propose a generalized distance field function which considers not only geometrical complexity but also physical complexity of fluid body. And the new sampling rules for splitting and merging of particles are also presented. This can greatly reduce the computation time of the dynamic fluid simulation. Then, a new pressure state equation and an adaptive surface tension model are proposed to enhance the stability of the system and to make the free surface more realistic. To further accelerate the computation, a special fluid solver is designed and implemented using GPU. Various fluid phenomena like breaking wave and flood are simulated at real-time. Experiments demonstrate that our new adaptive model can greatly enhance the computation efficiency of fluid simulation compared with previous adaptive methods. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.