Xue Cui
M.Sc. Candidate
Supervisor: Dr. Minglun Gong

Lattice Boltzmann Method and Vortex Methods for Fluid Animation

Department of Computer Science
Friday, January 27, 2017, 11:00 a.m., Room EN 2022

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Abstract

Most fluid solvers for visual effects are based on splitting Navier-Stokes (N-S) PDEs. In the N-S solver, a projection step is often applied to correct the minor errors from advection and produces the divergence free constraint for incompressible fluid flow in order to output flows with swirls. It is one of the key steps in classic N-S solver, giving us turbulence visual effects. We follow the conventional N-S based solver, but mainly focus on a growing popular method named as LBM (Lattice Boltzmann Method). Many visual effect researches have proposed to utilize LBM's straightforward parallelizable feature but neglected its capabilities for generating appealing visual effects. By investigating popular vortex methods of classic N-S solvers, we presented hybrid methods for enriching visual complexity for LBM. They require additional steps for vortex calculation and boundary conditions processing on macroscopic and microscopic levels, but are able to provide rich details for the simulation with acceptable computation cost. Compared to introducing a complex turbulence model for LBM, our approach is easy-to-implement and straightforward.