Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics with particle splitting, applied to self-gravitating collapse

By S. Kitsionas, A. Whitworth. 2002

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe and demonstrate a method for increasing the resolution locally in a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) simulation, by splitting particles. We show that in simulations of self-gravitating collapse (of the sort that are presumed to occur in star formation) the method is stable, and affords great savings in computer time and memory. When applied to the standard Boss & Bodenheimer test - which has been shown to depend critically on fulfilment of the Jeans Condition - the results are comparable both with those obtained using Adaptive Mesh Refinement, and with those obtained using a standard high-resolution SPH simulation, but they are achieved with considerably less computational resource. Further development and testing is required before the method can safely be applied to more general flows.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ed60a78f5ec7b89c525e5386984442e674bc7e1

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Citations in the corpus

SIMULATIONS ON A MOVING MESH: THE CLUSTERED FORMATION OF POPULATION III PROTOSTARS (2011, background): “The addition of cells in grid codes is comparatively straightforward, while special care must be taken in SPH simulations to avoid substantial noise when new particles are inserted (Kitsionas & Whitworth 2002).”
Gravitational fragmentation and the formation of brown dwarfs in stellar clusters (2008, background): “Particle splitting results in a marked increase in resolution without unmanageable computational costs (Kitsionas & Whitworth 2002, 2007).”
Radiative transfer and the energy equation in SPH simulations of star formation (2007, background): “If the collapse were isothermal, this bar should not show any tendency to fragment (e.g. Truelove et al. 1998; Klein et al. 1999; Kitsionas & Whitworth 2002).”
Supermassive black hole binaries in gaseous and stellar circumnuclear discs: orbital dynamics and gas accretion (2006, methodology): “We split each gas particle into Nch = 10 “child” particles (Kitsionas & Whitworth 2002), randomly distributed around the position of the original parent particle within a volume of size ∼ h3p, where hp is the gravitational softening (of the parent particles).”
The First Stars (2003, methodology): “Recently, the dynamical range of the standard SPH method has been significantly improved by implementing a “particle splitting” technique (Kitsionas & Whitworth 2002, Bromm & Loeb 2003a).”
ONE HUNDRED FIRST STARS: PROTOSTELLAR EVOLUTION AND THE FINAL MASSES (2013, methodology): “We use the particle-splitting technique of Kitsionas & Whitworth (2002) to achieve a wide dynamic range.”
Toward Understanding Massive Star Formation (2007, background): “This states that ”the local Jeans mass must always remain resolved,” i.e., it must contain more than a certain number of particles (Truelove et al. 1997, Bate & Burkert 1997, Kitsionas & Whitworth 2002, Martel, Evans & Shapiro 2006).”
Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics in Astrophysics (2010, methodology): “Special on-the-fly particle splitting methods have been developed in order to guarantee that the Jeans mass stays resolved over the coarse of a simulation (Kitsionas & Whitworth, 2002, 2007).”
Adaptively sampled particle fluids (2007, background): “Examples include [Desbrun and Cani 1999; Kitsionas and Whitworth 2002; Lastiwka et al. 2005], where typically particles are added or removed according to requirements on physical accuracy.”
The First Stars (2012, methodology): “At this point, they extract a spherical region containing 1000 M of gas from the centre of the minihalo, and resimulate this region at much higher resolution, using several nested levels of particle splitting (Kitsionas & Whitworth, 2002; Bromm & Loeb, 2003).”
Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) for free-surface flows: past, present and future (2016, methodology): “…models since the early 1990s, but until recently there were no equivalent developments in SPH. Early efforts to employ the variable particle resolutions in SPH were made by Kitsionas and Whitworth (2002), and later strengthened using a variationally-derived formulation by Feldman and Bonet (2007).”
Dynamic refinement and boundary contact forces in SPH with applications in fluid flow problems (2007, background): “[21] particles are added in regions of high velocity gradient and removed in regions of low velocity gradient and Kitsionas and Whitworth [20] have applied particle splitting to astrophysics problems where the refinement criterion is based on a physical condition the particles need to satisfy known ”
Simulating star formation in molecular cloud cores. I. The influence of low levels of turbulence on fragmentation and multiplicity (2003, background): “A number of studies has shown that it is essential to resolve the Jeans mass in simulations of fragmentation (e.g. Bate & Burkert 1997; Whitworth 1998; Truelove et al 1998; Sigalotti & Klapp 2001; Kitsionas & Whitworth 2002).”
Primordial star formation under the influence of far ultraviolet radiation: 1540 cosmological haloes and the stellar mass distribution (2015, methodology): “When a cloud collapses, we continually increase the spatial resolution by adopting the particle-splitting technique (Kitsionas & Whitworth 2002) to insure that the local Jeans length is always resolved by 15 times the local smoothing length of the SPH particles.”