English

Boundary conditions for SPH through energy conservation

Fluid Dynamics 2025-11-06 v2

Abstract

Dealing with boundary conditions in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) poses significant difficulties, indeed being one of the SPHERIC Grand Challenges. In particular, wall boundary conditions have been pivotal in SPH model development since it evolved from astrophysics to more generic fluid dynamics simulations. Despite considerable attention from researchers and numerous publications dedicated to formulating and assessing wall boundary conditions, few of them have addressed the crucial aspect of energy conservation. This work introduces a novel boundary condition designed with energy conservation as a primary consideration, effectively extending the unconditional stability of SPH to problems involving wall boundary conditions. The result is formulated within the framework of the Boundary Integrals technique. The proposal is tested on a number of cases: normal impact against a wall, adiabatic oscillations of a piston, dam break, and the water landing of a spacecraft.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.08573,
  title  = {Boundary conditions for SPH through energy conservation},
  author = {Jose Luis Cercos-Pita and Daniel Duque and Pablo Eleazar Merino-Alonso and Javier Calderon-Sanchez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.08573},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

35 pages, 25 figures. SPH solver released as free software (see https://gitlab.com/sanguinariojoe/aquagpusph). Accepted for publication on "Computers & Fluids"

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:17:29.027Z