Smoothed particle hydrodynamics for compressible aerospace applications

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is not widely used in aerospace engineering applications that involve compressible flows despite compressible hydrodynamics being one of the focal points of SPH since its origins. A reason for this is the unavailability of boundary treatment methods for compressible flows within SPH, essential for simulating flows in and around bodies. Moreover, modulating the number of particles in a region becomes necessary in many scenarios involving compressible flows. The boundary treatment has been addressed in our recent work. In this work, we present our attempt at solving other critical issues that arise in compressible SPH simulations by combining our boundary treatment with an adaptive resolution procedure. We propose shock-based solution adaptivity and shock-aware particle shifting within the adaptivity procedure. A wide variety of test problems are employed to illustrate the effectiveness of boundary treatment and the adaptivity procedure in resolving existing issues, including errors due to interaction with differently spaced ghost particles, formation of spot-like structures due to particle clumping, and poorly resolved low-density regions. The boundary treatment method and adaptive resolution procedure would make SPH a more attractive choice for aerospace engineering applications involving compressible flows.