Adaptive particle refinement and derefinement applied to the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method

SPH simulations are usually performed with a uniform particle distribution. New techniques have been recently proposed to enable the use of spatially varying particle distributions, which encouraged the development of automatic adaptivity and particle refinement/derefinement algorithms. All these efforts resulted in very interesting and promising procedures leading to more efficient and faster SPH simulations. In this article, a family of particle refinement techniques is reviewed and a new derefinement technique is proposed and validated through several test cases involving both free-surface and viscous flows. Besides, this new procedure allows higher resolutions in the regions requiring increased accuracy. Moreover, several levels of refinement can be used with this new technique, as often encountered in adaptive mesh refinement techniques in mesh-based methods. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.