Inviscid and incompressible fluid simulation on triangle meshes

Abstract

Simulating fluid motion on manifold surfaces is an interesting but rarely explored area because of the difficulty of establishing plausible physical models. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for inviscid fluid simulation over meshes. It can enforce incompressibility on closed surfaces by utilizing a discrete vector field decomposition algorithm. It also includes effective implementations of semi-Lagrangian tracing and velocity interpolation schemes. Different from previous work, our method performs simulations directly on triangle meshes and thus eliminates parametrization distortions. Our implementation can produce convincing fluid motion on surfaces and has interactive performance for meshes with tens of thousands of faces. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.