Realtime Two-Way Coupling of Meshless Fluids and Nonlinear FEM

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel method to couple Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and nonlinear FEM to animate the interaction of fluids and deformable solids in real time. To accurately model the coupling, we generate proxy particles over the boundary of deformable solids to facilitate the interaction with fluid particles, and develop an efficient method to distribute the coupling forces of proxy particles to FEM nodal points. Specifically, we employ the Total Lagrangian Explicit Dynamics (TLED) finite element algorithm for nonlinear FEM because of many of its attractive properties such as supporting massive parallelism, avoiding dynamic update of stiffness matrix computation, and efficient solver. Based on a predictor-corrector scheme for both velocity and position, different normal and tangential conditions can be realized even for shell-like thin solids. Our coupling method is entirely implemented on modern GPUs using CUDA. We demonstrate the advantage of our two-way coupling method in computer animation via various virtual scenarios.