EFFICIENT SIMULATION OF THE FLUID-STRUCTURE INTERFACE

In this work, an alternative method to simulate fluid interactions with compliant surfaces is described. The simulation of the fluid phenomena is performed by the Smooth Particle Hidrodynamics (SPH) method. In the normal SPH method, solid interfaces are modeled with sets of static particles covering the boundaries. In the proposed alternative method, a compliant-solid interface is modeled as a polygon allowing to substitute the particles that represent a surface in the normal SPH method. Therefore, by considering less particles, a simplification on simulations is achieved, and the alternative method still describes the general behavior of the phenomena. Furthermore, a deformable object, this is, a time variant object, can be modeled as a polyhedron, with a mass-spring-dashpot system in each of its edges, and with each polygon as a compliant-solid interface. Bidirectional dependence on the alternative method for fluid simulation and the deformable model gives a new method for the simulation of compliant solids partially or fully immersed in an incompressible fluid. This new method is not intended to have a high accuracy in the numerical results but to have a perceptual high qualitative behavior and fast numerical response, to be applied in visual/haptic simulators.