Progress in smooth particle hydrodynamics

Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a meshless, Lagrangian numerical method for hydrodynamics calculations where calculational elements are fuzzy particles which move according to the hydrodynamic equations of motion. Each particle carries local values of density, temperature, pressure and other hydrodynamic parameters. A major advantage of SPH is that it is meshless, thus large deformation calculations can be easily done with no connectivity complications. Interface positions are known and there are no problems with advecting quantities through a mesh that typical Eulerian codes have. These underlying SPH features make fracture physics easy and natural and in fact, much of the applications work revolves around simulating fracture. Debris particles from impacts can be easily transported across large voids with SPH. While SPH has considerable promise, there are some problems inherent in the technique that have so far limited its usefulness. The most serious problem is the well known instability in tension leading to particle clumping and numerical fracture. Another problem is that the SPH interpolation is only correct when particles are uniformly spaced a half particle apart leading to incorrect strain rates, accelerations and other quantities for general particle distributions. SPH calculations are also sensitive to particle locations. The standard artificial viscosity treatment in SPH leads to spurious viscosity in shear flows. This paper will demonstrate solutions for these problems that they and others have been developing. The most promising is to replace the SPH interpolant with the moving least squares (MLS) interpolant invented by Lancaster and Salkauskas in 1981. SPH and MLS are closely related with MLS being essentially SPH with corrected particle volumes. When formulated correctly, JLS is conservative, stable in both compression and tension, does not have the SPH boundary problems and is not sensitive to particle placement. The other approach to solving SPH problems, pioneered by Randles and Libersky, is to use a different SPH equation and to renormalize the kernel gradient sums. Finally the authors present results using the SPH statistical fracture model (SPHSFM). It has been applied to a series of ball on plate impacts performed by Grady and Kipp. A description of the model and comparison with the experiments will be given.