Publications Details

Conservative smoothing versus artificial viscosity

Guenther, C.; Hicks, D.L.; Swegle, J.W.

This report was stimulated by some recent investigations of S.P.H. (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method). Solid dynamics computations with S.P.H. show symptoms of instabilities which are not eliminated by artificial viscosities. Both analysis and experiment indicate that conservative smoothing eliminates the instabilities in S.P.H. computations which artificial viscosities cannot. Questions were raised as to whether conservative smoothing might smear solutions more than artificial viscosity. Conservative smoothing, properly used, can produce more accurate solutions than the von Neumann-Richtmyer-Landshoff artificial viscosity which has been the standard for many years. The authors illustrate this using the vNR scheme on a test problem with known exact solution involving a shock collision in an ideal gas. They show that the norms of the errors with conservative smoothing are significantly smaller than the norms of the errors with artificial viscosity.