Dynamic refinement and boundary contact forces in SPH with applications in fluid flow problems

Abstract This paper presents a general method for dynamic particle refinement in smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). Candidate particles are split into several ‘ daughter ’ particles according to a given refinement pattern centred about the original particle. Through the solution of a non‐linear minimization problem the optimal mass distribution of the daughter particles is obtained so as to reduce the errors introduced to the underlying density field. This procedure necessarily conserves the mass of the system. Conservation of energy and momentum results are also discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.