Physically Based Simulation and Animation of Gaseous Phenomena in a Periodic Domain

In this project report I present my research and accompanying implementation of the unconditionally stable Navier-Stokes partial differential equation (PDE) solver presented to the computer graphics community by Jos Stam at the 1999 SIGGRAPH conference [Stam 1999]. I give a brief introduction to computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the governing Navier-Stokes equations and an overview of previous work in the field. My software implementation (the flowanim demo) is based on Stam’s simple fluid solver [Stam 2002] and therefore also makes use of a black box Fourier transform, the FFTW package [Frigo and Johnson 1998]. The smoke animation system is further enhanced by addition of a powerful technique known as vorticity confinement, which was introduced to CG at SIGGRAPH 2001 [Fedkiw et al. 2001]. Finally, I visualize the solution of all terms of the Navier-Stokes equations, including the vorticity confinement term, to help students and researchers unfamiliar with the equations of fluid flow to easily understand the underlying concepts.