An incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics method for the motion of rigid bodies in fluids

A two-dimensional incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics scheme is presented for simulation of rigid bodies moving through Newtonian fluids. The scheme relies on combined usage of the rigidity constraints and the viscous penalty method to simulate rigid body motion. Different viscosity ratios and interpolation schemes are tested by simulating a rigid disc descending in quiescent medium. A viscosity ratio of 100 coupled with weighted harmonic averaging scheme has been found to provide satisfactory results. The performance of the resulting scheme is systematically tested for cases with linear motion, rotational motion and their combination. The test cases include sedimentation of a single and a pair of circular discs, sedimentation of an elliptic disc and migration and rotation of a circular disc in linear shear flow. Comparison with previous results at various Reynolds numbers indicates that the proposed method captures the motion of rigid bodies driven by flow or external body forces accurately. •An ISPH scheme for the motion of rigid bodies in Newtonian fluids is presented.•The scheme relies on combined use of rigidity constraints and viscous penalty.•A viscosity ratio of 100 and weighted harmonic averaging was found satisfactory.•The proposed scheme is easy to implement and circumvents explicit boundary conditions.•The scheme is successfully tested for linear and rotational motion.