Overview

nanoFluidX can simulate complex flows that are difficult or infeasible to handle using classical CFD approaches such as Finite Volume Methods. The main advantages of SPH are the conservation of mass and momentum (linear and angular) in the absence of physical dissipation. In some cases, this is due to viscous shear effects and the exact advection of the particles.

SPH is powerful for simulating free-surface flows as well as multi-phase flows with complex physical phenomena such as surface-tension or interfacial transport processes. Use of a pure particle representation allows for modeling solid dynamics and fluid-structure-interaction as well.

A limitation of the method is an increased computational complexity compared to FV-schemes. A comparable virtual stencil of a SPH particle consists of up to O(100) particles in three dimensions.

For each individual particle, the interaction forces are calculated only from neighboring particles within a certain vicinity and the position of the particles can be updated explicitly and independently of each other. As a consequence, SPH is well suited for GPGPUs (General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processing Unit) as their compute power can be extracted best with parallelized algorithms.

nanoFluidX follows the weakly-compressible SPH approach (WCSPH). For truly incompressible SPH, the particles cannot be updated independently.