Technical Report 2010-2 Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics in Acoustic Simulations

This contribution reports on the potential and limits of a meshless Lagrangian technique, called Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), as a method for acoustic simulation. The established techniques for acoustic simulation, such as the Boundary Element Method (BEM), Finite Differences Method (FD), and Finite Element Method (FEM), draw on mesh-based numerical solution techniques. In spite of steady improvements made during the last two decades, these methods continue to have difficulties handling inhomogeneous media, capturing aero-acoustic effects or solving applications with moving boundaries. The investigation of an SPH meshless approach for modeling sound propagation is carried out in order to assess its potential in relation to these difficulties. The fluid dynamics SPH formulation used in the simulations, handles compressible and viscous fluids and is versatile while straight forward to implement in a parallel and highly scalable fashion. Several sequential and parallel computational experiments with 1-D, 2D and 3-D models are carried out for the verification of the methodology. The contribution concludes with an analysis of the solution sensitivity with respect to SPH formulation parameters and a discussion of the challenges associated with enforcing boundary conditions.