A critical investigation of smoothed particle hydrodynamics applied to problems with free‐surfaces

In this paper, an in‐depth study of SPH method, in its original weakly compressible version, is achieved on dedicated 2D and 3D free‐surface flow test cases. These rather critical prototype problems shall constitute suitable test cases to get through when building a free‐surface SPH model. The present work aims at investigating various numerical aspects of this method, often little mentioned in literature. In particular, a great care is paid to the dynamic part of the solution, which is critical to the local hydrodynamic load prediction. The role of numerical errors in the development of acoustic frequencies in the pressure signals is discussed, as well as the influence of the choice of the sound velocity. On the shown test problems, it is also evidenced that some numerical tools are crucial to ensure the robustness and accuracy of the standard SPH method. The convergence of our model is heuristically proved on these nonlinear prototype tests, showing at the same time the very satisfactory level of accuracy reached. Through these tests, some other numerical specificities of the SPH method are discussed, such as the self‐redistribution of the particles occurring during the Lagrangian evolution. A higher order model is also proposed, and its advantages and drawbacks are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.