Algorithms for uniform particle initialization in domains with complex boundaries

Abstract: Accurate mesh-free simulation of fluid flows involving complex boundaries requires that the boundaries be captured accurately in terms of particles. In the context of incompressible/weakly-compressible fluid flow, the SPH method is more accurate when the particle distribution is uniform. Hence, for the time accurate simulation of flow in the presence of complex boundaries, one must have both an accurate boundary discretization as well as a uniform distribution of particles to initialize the simulation. This process of obtaining an initial uniform distribution of particles is called "particle packing". In this paper, various particle packing algorithms present in the literature are implemented and compared. An improved SPH-based algorithm is proposed which produces uniform particle distributions of both the fluid and solid domains in two and three dimensions. Some challenging geometries are constructed to demonstrate the accuracy of the new algorithm. The implementation of the algorithm is open source and the manuscript is fully reproducible.