Visual simulation of freezing ice with air bubbles

Abstract

Ice often contains small air bubbles that are dissolved air exhausted from water-ice interface. Depicting these air bubbles with various sizes enhances the realism of ice. This paper proposes a fast simulation method of freezing ice taking into account air bubbles. Our method introduces a physically-based calculation method of the sizes of air bubbles based on the freezing velocity and pressure. In contrast to the previous method, our method can represent numerous small bubbles that cannot be represented by using the resolutions of simulation grids. The computations of heat transfer, tracking of water-ice interface, and generation of bubbles are accelerated by implementing our method using CUDA. Our method achieves the freezing simulation and bubble generation at interactive frame-rates.