Vortical Inviscid Flows with Two-Way Solid-Fluid Coupling

Vortex methods increasingly receive attention from the computer graphics community for simple and direct modeling of complex flow phenomena such as turbulence. The coupling between free-form solids, represented by arbitrary surface meshes, and fluids simulated with vortex methods, leads to visually rich simulations. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for simulating the interaction between solids and inviscid fluids for high-quality simulations using Lagrangian vortex particles. The key aspect of our method is simulating the creation of vorticity at a solid's surface. While previous vortex simulators only focus on modeling the solid as a boundary for the fluid, our approach allows the accurate simulation of two processes of visual interest. The first is the introduction of surface vorticity in the main flow as turbulence (vortex shedding). The second is the motion of the solid induced by fluid forces. We also introduce to computer graphics the concept of source panels to model nonturbulent flow around objects. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on two-way coupling of 3D solids and fluids using Lagrangian vortex methods in computer graphics.