Particle based modeling and simulation of natural phenomena

Abstract

This thesis is about modeling and simulation of fluids and cloth-like deformable objects by the physically-based simulation paradigm. Simulated objects are modeled with particles and their interaction with each other and the environment is defined by particle-to-particle forces. We propose several improvements over the existing particle simulation techniques. Neighbor search algorithms are crucial for the performance efficiency and robustness of a particle system. We present a sorting-based neighbor search method which operates on a uniform grid, and can be parallelizable. We improve upon the existing fluid surface generation methods so that our method captures surface details better since we consider the relative position of fluid particles to the fluid surface. We investigate several alternatives of particle interaction schema (i.e. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, the Discrete Element Method, and Lennard-Jones potential) for the purpose of defining fluid-fluid, fluid-cloth, fluid-boundary interaction forces. We also propose a practical way to simulate knitwear and its interaction with fluids. We employ capillary pressure–based forces to simulate the absorption of fluid particles by knitwear. We also propose a method to simulate the flow of miscible fluids. Our particle simulation system is implement to exploit parallel computing capabilities of the commodity computers. Specifically, we implemented the proposed methods on multicore CPUs and programmable graphics boards. The experiments show that our method is computationally efficient and produces realistic results.