Reducing numerical dissipation in smoke simulation

•The survey gives a first complete and up-to-date overview of reducing numerical dissipation for smoke simulation.•Methods are classified and compared in terms of their merits and shortcomings.•Applicability of methods in different application scenarios is given for practitioners to choose the appropriate one for their practical use.

Numerical dissipation acts as artificial viscosity to make smoke viscous. Reducing numerical dissipation is able to recover visual details smeared out by the numerical dissipation. Great efforts have been devoted to suppress the numerical dissipation in smoke simulation in the past few years. In this paper we investigate methods of combating the numerical dissipation. We describe visual consequences of the numerical dissipation and explore sources that introduce the numerical dissipation into course of smoke simulation. Methods are investigated from various aspects including grid variation, high-order advection, sub-grid compensation, invariant conservation, and particle-based improvement, followed by discussion and comparison in terms of visual quality, computational overhead, ease of implementation, adaptivity, and scalability, which leads to their different applicability to various application scenarios.

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