An improved particle smoothing procedure for Laplacian operator in a randomly scattered cloud

ABSTRACT

In the present study, an improved particle smoothing (IPS) procedure is proposed to imitate the Laplacian operator in a randomly scattered particle cloud. It is devised to provide a more accurate mathematical representation of diffusion term in the moving particle methods. From the numerical analyses, the major source of conventional particle smoothing (PS) schemes leading to solution inaccuracy can be attributed to the intrinsic artificial convection term, whose accuracy order is of O(δ⁻¹). Spatial accuracy can be improved by eliminating the numerically induced artificial velocity in the proposed IPS scheme. Verification studies are performed by testing the proposed scheme in pure diffusion problems. Benchmark lid-driven cavity and backward-facing step flow problems are solved to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme. In the light of numerical analysis and computational results, it is concluded that the proposed IPS scheme is effective to simulate fluid flow problems in the context of moving particle methods.