Publication Alert: Resolution-adjusted boundary particles for Adaptive SPH

Resolution-adjusted boundary particles for Adaptive SPH by Andreas Kolb et al has just been accepted in The Visual Computer!

In Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), accurate boundary handling is essential, especially when using adaptive particle resolutions to combine efficiency with fine detail. Existing methods typically rely on fixed boundary particle resolution, which can cause inaccuracies when fluid particle sizes vary.

Our contribution: We introduce a novel boundary handling approach where boundary particles dynamically adapt their sizes to match neighboring fluid particles. This ensures consistent kernel interactions across varying resolutions, improved fidelity in surface detail near boundaries, reduced artifacts such as spurious fluid penetration as well as maintained computational efficiency.

Additionally, we propose a density gradient–based optimization technique for sampling and positioning boundary particles, after refinement or coarsening for a uniform and stable boundary representation.
Our experiments (including challenging dam-break and dragon scenarios) show significant improvements over non-adaptive methods while preserving efficiency.

Open-source implementation available at https://zenodo.org/records/15519147 and video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xznl-Cqic

Proud to share this step toward more robust and accurate adaptive SPH simulations.