Investigation into smoothed particle hydrodynamics for non-newtonian droplet modelling

Abstract

Droplet splatter dynamics is an important study in the field of forensics since a crime event can produce many blood stains. Understanding the origins of the blood stains from pure observations is very difficult because much of the information about the impact is lost. A theoretical model is therefore needed to better understand the dynamics of droplet impact and splatter. We chose to explore a fluid modelling method known as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to determine whether it is capable of modelling droplet splatter accurately. Specifically, we chose to investigate an SPH version of a non-Newtonian pressure correction method with surface tension. Three experiments were performed to analyze the different aspects of SPH. From the results of the experiments, we concluded that this method can produce stable simulations if an artificial viscosity model is included, a third-order polynomial kernel is used and the pressure boundary condition on surface particles are non-zero.