PANORMUS-SPH. A new Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics solver for incompressible flows

Abstract

A new Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) solver is presented, fully integrated within the PANORMUS package [7], originally developed as a Finite Volume Method (FVM) solver. The proposed model employs the fully Incompressible SPH approach, where a Fractional Step Method is used to make the numerical solution march in time. The main novelty of the proposed model is the use of a general and highly flexible procedure to account for different boundary conditions, based on the discretization of the boundary surfaces with a set of triangles and the introduction of mirror particles with suitable hydrodynamic properties. Both laminar and turbulent flows can be solved (the latter using the ε turbulence closure) and considerable flexibility in the solver algorithms is guaranteed, achieved through the use of the available Graphical User Interface. The integration of the FVM and SPH solvers within one code easily allows to develop an hybrid approach, using a simple and efficient procedure described in the paper. Model performance is tested for a series of benchmark cases for which analytical, numerical and/or experimental comparison results are available, demonstrating the ability of the solver to provide reliable solutions of incompressible flows.