Fluids, Threads and Fibers: Towards High Performance Physics-based Modeling and Simulation

  • Han Shao

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

Accelerating physics-based simulations has been an evergreen topic across different scientific communities. This dissertation is devoted to this subject addressing bottlenecks in state-of-the-art approaches to the simulation of fluids of large-scale scenes, viscous threads, magnetic fluids, and the simulation of fibers and thin structures. The contributions within the thesis are rooted in mathematical modeling and numerical simulation as well as in machine learning. The first part deals with the simulation of incompressible flow in a multigrid fashion. For the variational viscous equation, geometric multigrid is inefficient. An Unsmoothed Aggregation Algebraic Multigrid method is devised with a multi-color Gauss-Seidel smoother, which consistently solves this equation in a few iterations for various material parameters. This framework is 2.0 to 14.6 times faster compared to the state-of-the-art adaptive octree solver in commercial software for the large-scale simulation of both non-viscous and viscous flow. In the second part, a new physical model is devised to accelerate the macroscopic simulation of magnetic fluids. Previous work is based on the classical Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method and a Kelvin force model. Unfortunately, this model results in a force pointing outwards causing significant levitation problems limiting the application of more advanced SPH frameworks such as Divergence-Free SPH (DFSPH) or Implicit Incompressible SPH (IISPH). This shortcoming has been addressed with this new current loop magnetic force model resulting in more stable and fast simulations of magnetic fluids using DFSPH and IISPH. Following a different trajectory, the third part of this thesis aims for the acceleration of iterative solvers widely used to accurately simulate physical systems. We speedup the simulation for rod dynamics with Graph Networks by predicting the initial guesses to reduce the number of iterations for the constraint projection part of a Position-based Dynamics solver. Compared to existing methods, this approach guarantees long-term stability and therefore leads to more accurate solutions.
Date of AwardJun 2022
Original languageEnglish (US)
Awarding Institution
  • Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering
SupervisorDominik Michels (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Physics-based Simulation
  • Data-driven Simulation
  • Multigrid
  • Viscosity
  • Ferofluid
  • PBD
  • Rod Dynamics
  • Graph Network

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