Practical Animation of Compressible Flow for Shockwaves and Related Phenomena

We propose a practical approach to integrating shock wave dynamics into traditional smoke simulations. Previous methods either simplify away the compressible component of the flow and are unable to capture shock fronts or use a prohibitively expensive explicit method that limits the time step of the simulation long after the relevant shock waves and rarefactions have left the domain. Instead, we employ a semi-implicit formulation of Euler’s equations, which allows us to take time steps on the order of the fluid velocity (ignoring the more stringent acoustic wave-speed restrictions) and avoids the expensive characteristic decomposition typically required of compressible flow solvers. We also propose an extension to Euler’s equations to model combustion of fuel in explosions. The flow is two-way coupled with rigid and deformable solid bodies, treating the solid-fluid interface effects implicitly in a projection step by enforcing a velocity boundary condition on the fluid and integrating pressure forces along the solid surface. As we handle the acoustic fluid effects implicitly, we can artificially drive the sound speed c of the fluid to infinity without going unstable or driving the time step to zero. This permits the fluid to transition from compressible flow to the far more tractable incompressible flow regime once the interesting compressible flow phenomena (such as shocks) have left the domain of interest, and allows the use of state-of-the-art smoke simulation techniques.

Practical Animation of Compressible Flow for Shockwaves and Related Phenomena