Unified description of fluids and solids in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Abstract: Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) methods are advantageous in simulations of fluids in domains with free boundary. Special SPH methods have also been developed to simulate solids. However, there are situations where the matter behaves partly as a fluid and partly as a solid, for instance, the solidification front in 3D printing, or any system involving both fluid and solid phases. We develop an SPH-like method that is suitable for both fluids and solids at the same time. Instead of the typical discretization of hydrodynamics, we discretize the Symmetric Hyperbolic Thermodynamically Compatible equations (SHTC), which describe both fluids, elastic solids, and visco-elasto-plastic solids within a single framework. The resulting SHTC-SPH method is then tested on various benchmarks from the hydrodynamics and dynamics of solids and shows remarkable agreement with the data.