Preserving geometry and topology for fluid flows with thin obstacles and narrow gaps
Vinicius C. Azevedo, Christopher Batty, Manuel M. Oliveira
2016
ACM Transactions on Graphics
Rotating Paddle: 23 × 10 × 6 grid Hollow Dragon: 11 × 9 × 6 grid Linked Tori: 7 × 7 × 7 grid Figure 1 : Our geometry-and topology-aware boundary treatment supports simulating smooth flows in the presence of thin solid geometry and narrow gaps on very coarse grids. Abstract Fluid animation methods based on Eulerian grids have long struggled to resolve flows involving narrow gaps and thin solid features. Past approaches have artificially inflated or voxelized boundaries, although this sacrifices
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... he correct geometry and topology of the fluid domain and prevents flow through narrow regions. We present a boundary-respecting fluid simulator that overcomes these challenges. Our solution is to intersect the solid boundary geometry with the cells of a background regular grid to generate a topologically correct, boundary-conforming cut-cell mesh. We extend both pressure projection and velocity advection to support this enhanced grid structure. For pressure projection, we introduce a general graph-based scheme that properly preserves discrete incompressibility even in thin and topologically complex flow regions, while nevertheless yielding symmetric positive definite linear systems. For advection, we exploit polyhedral interpolation to improve the degree to which the flow conforms to irregular and possibly non-convex cell boundaries, and propose a modified PIC/FLIP advection scheme to eliminate the need to inaccurately reinitialize invalid cells that are swept over by moving boundaries. The method naturally extends the standard Eulerian fluid simulation framework, and while we focus on thin boundaries, our contributions are beneficial for volumetric solids as well. Our results demonstrate successful one-way fluid-solid coupling in the presence of thin objects and narrow flow regions even on very coarse grids. We first introduce a topologically-accurate, graph-based discretization for the pressure projection on the cut-cell mesh which can resolve flows in difficult regions. Furthermore, it offers greater fidelity than prior work on thin solids: it better accounts for the sub-© ACM, 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in
doi:10.1145/2897824.2925919
fatcat:xsscfvzoijaoznirkocsgt5agq