Synthetic Turbulence using Artificial Boundary Layers , SIGGRAPH Asia 2009

T. Pfaff, N. Thuerey, A. Selle, M. Gross
Synthetic Turbulence using Artificial Boundary Layers
Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Asia (Yokohama, Japan, December 16-19, 2009)

Turbulent vortices in fluid flows are crucial for a visually interesting
appearance. Although there has been a significant amount of work on turbulence
in graphics recently, these algorithms rely on the underlying simulation to
resolve the flow around objects. We build upon work from classical fluid
mechanics to design an algorithm that allows us to accurately precompute the
turbulence being generated around an object immersed in a flow. This is made
possible by modeling turbulence formation based on an averaged flow field, and
relying on universal laws describing the flow near a wall. We precompute the
confined vorticity in the boundary layer around an object, and simulate the
boundary layer separation during a fluid simulation. Then, a turbulence model is
used to identify areas where this separated layer will transition into actual
turbulence. We sample these regions with vortex particles, and simulate the
further dynamics of the vortices based on these particles. We will show how our
method complements previous work on synthetic turbulence, and yields physically
plausible results. In addition, we demonstrate that our method can efficiently
compute turbulent flows around a variety of objects including cars, whisks, as
well as boulders in a river flow. We can even apply our model to precomputed
static flow fields, yielding turbulent dynamics without a costly simulation.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• fluids
• turbulence
• siggraph
• asia

[glacierise]

Great method! I hope that gets implemented in something like FumeFX soon.