Analysis and improvements of Adaptive Particle Refinement (APR) through CPU time, accuracy and robustness considerations

Abstract While smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations are usually performed using uniform particle distributions, local particle refinement techniques have been developed to concentrate fine spatial resolutions in identified areas of interest. Although the formalism of this method is relatively easy to implement, its robustness at coarse/fine interfaces can be problematic. Analysis performed in [16] shows that the radius of refined particles should be greater than half the radius of unrefined particles to ensure robustness. In this article, the basics of an Adaptive Particle Refinement (APR) technique, inspired by AMR in mesh-based methods, are presented. This approach ensures robustness with alleviated constraints. Simulations applying the new formalism proposed achieve accuracy comparable to fully refined spatial resolutions, together with robustness, low CPU times and maintained parallel efficiency.