Incompressible-compressible flows with a transient discontinuous interface using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH)

A new two-phase incompressible-compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method has been developed where the interface is discontinuous in density. This is applied to water-air problems with a large density difference. The incompressible phase requires surface pressure from the compressible phase and the compressible phase requires surface velocity from the incompressible phase. Compressible SPH is used for the air phase (with the isothermal stiffened ideal gas equation of state for low Mach numbers) and divergence-free (projection based) incompressible SPH is used for the water phase, with the addition of Fickian shifting to produce sufficiently homogeneous particle distributions to enable stable, accurate, converged solutions without noise in the pressure field. Shifting is a purely numerical particle regularisation device. The interface remains a true material discontinuity at a high density ratio with continuous pressure and velocity at the interface. This approach with the physics of compressibility and incompressibility represented is novel within SPH and is validated against semi-analytical results for a two-phase elongating and oscillating water drop, analytical results for low amplitude inviscid standing waves, the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and a dam break problem with high interface distortion and impact on a vertical wall where experimental and other numerical results are available.