Simulating anisotropic diffusion processes with smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Abstract: Diffusion problems with anisotropic features arise in the various areas of science and engineering fields. As a Lagrangian mesh-less method, SPH has a special advantage in addressing the diffusion problems due to the the benefit of dealing with the advection term. But its application to solving anisotropic diffusion is still limited since a robust and general SPH formulation is required to obtain accurate approximations of second derivatives. In this paper, we modify a second derivatives model based on the SPH formulation to obtain a full version of Hessian matrix consisting of the Laplacian operator elements. To verify the proposed SPH scheme, firstly, the diffusion of a scalar which distributes following a pre-function within a thin structure is performed by using anisotropic resolution coupling anisotropic kernel. With various anisotropic ratios, excellent agreements with the theoretical solution are achieved. Then, the anisotropic diffusion of a contaminant in fluid is simulated. The simulation results are very consistent with corresponding analytical solutions, showing that the present algorithm can obtain smooth solution without the spurious oscillations for contaminant transport problems with discontinuities, and achieve second-order accuracy. Subsequently, we utilize this newly developed SPH formulation to tackle the problem of the fluid diffusion through a thin porous membrane and the anisotropic transport of transmembrane potential within the left ventricle, demonstrating the capabilities of the proposed SPH framework in solving the complex anisotropic problems.