Revolutionary water simulation: TUM sets new standards in fluid technology!

Revolutionary water simulation: TUM sets new standards in fluid technology!

Researchers of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a groundbreaking method for realistic simulation of water. This innovative technique takes into account the interaction between water and air and aims to represent the movement of liquids more precisely. This is particularly relevant for the protection of coastal regions, as the realistic simulations of complex wave movements can now be efficiently calculated on commercially available computers.

Traditional computer graphics techniques have often struggled to adequately represent the interactions between water and air. Many solutions focused solely on water and neglected air. A new method now enables equal representation of both phases and can also display details such as aerosols and air turbulences much more realistically.

The importance of two-phase flow

The simulation of two-phase flows, i.e. liquids that do not mix with each other, is of crucial importance in many areas. These include, among other things, oil production, medicine and food processing. Traditional numerical methods for simulating such flows were often complex and tedious. The new method uses the Lattice-Boltzmann method (LBM), to simulate fluid dynamics at the microscopic level.

By combining LBM with a phase field approach, it is possible to significantly increase the accuracy of the simulations and at the same time reduce the mathematical complexity. The method does not require explicit derivations, which makes the calculation more efficient. It uses an order parameter that clearly signals where one liquid ends and the other begins.

Application examples and performance evaluation

The new method enables a variety of practical applications:

• Statische Tropfensimulation: Ein statischer Tropfen kann simuliert werden, wobei seine Form bis zur Stabilität verändert wird.
• Rayleigh-Taylor-Instabilität: Simulation von Flüssigkeiten unterschiedlichen Dichten unter Einfluss der Schwerkraft.
• Aufsteigende Blasensimulation: Simulation des Verhaltens einer Blase in einer dichteren Flüssigkeit.
• Tropfenzerfall in einem Wirbel: Simulation eines Tropfens in einer wirbelnden Umgebung zeigt, dass die neue Methode trotz irregulärer Strukturen angemessene Genauigkeit bietet.

The method has been tested on various computing platforms, including GPUs. The results show a significant performance improvement, especially for parallel computing systems, which further increases efficiency. Future work could even further optimize the method in more complex scenarios.

In computational fluid dynamics (CFD), new developments like these make it possible to revolutionize the calculation of fluid flows. With applications ranging from the optimization of vehicles to the resource-efficient design of machines, this new method shows promising progress towards more precise models and technological innovations.