Codimensional Surface Tension Flow on Simplicial Complexes

[Abstract]

Many visually interesting natural phenomena are characterized by thin liquid sheets, long filaments, and droplets. We present a new Lagrangian-based numerical method to simulate these codimensional surface tension driven phenomena using non-manifold simplicial complexes. Tetrahedra, triangles, segments, and points are used to model the fluid volume, thin films, filaments, and droplets, respectively. We present a new method for enforcing fluid incompressibility on simplicial complexes along with a physically-guided meshing algorithm to provide temporally consistent information for interparticle forces. Our method naturally allows for transitions between codimensions, either from tetrahedra to triangles to segments to points or vice versa, regardless of the simulation resolution. We demonstrate the efficacy of this method by simulating various natural phenomena that are characterized by thin fluid sheets, filaments, and surface tension effects.

 

[Materials]

Bo Zhu, Ed Quigley, Matthew Cong, Justin Solomon, Ronald Fedkiw. Codimensional Surface Tension Flow on Simplicial Complexes. 2014. ACM Transaction of Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH), Vol. 33, to appear.

Paper: [pdf], Video: [mp4, 177M], Vimeo: [link], Presentation: [slides]