Simulation of a flowing snow avalanche using molecular dynamics

Abstract

ii I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science.Prof. Dr. Bülent Özgüç (Supervisor) I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science. This thesis presents an approach for modeling and simulation of a flowing snow avalanche, which is formed of dry and liquefied snow that slides down a slope, by using molecular dynamics and discrete element method. A particle system is utilized as a base method for the simulation and marching cubes with real-time shaders are employed for rendering. A uniform grid based neighbor search algorithm is used for collision detection for inter-particle and particle-terrain interactions. A mass-spring model of collision resolution is employed to mimic compressibility of snow and particle attraction forces are put into use between particles and terrain surface. In order to achieve greater performance, general purpose GPU language and multi-threaded programming is utilized for collision detection and resolution. The results are displayed with different combinations of rendering methods for the realistic representation of the flowing avalanche.Keywords: flowing avalanche simulation, snow, discrete element method, particle system, marching cubes, parallel computing, GPU, CUDA, shared memo-

Digital 3D Animation of Powder-Snow Avalanches

“…Over the years, people in the entertainment industry have been using graphics tools and usual fluid simulation techniques to emulate snow avalanches (KAPLER, 2003;FLORES, 2008;imageworks, 2020;Failes, Ian, 2021). Tsuda et al (2010) is the first to bring physical properties of snow into account by producing a mixed simulation of dense snow flow and powdersnow layers, followed later by Güçer and ÖZGÜÇ (2014), which applies molecular dynamics to the flow. Cordonnier et al (2018) proposed a method for generating visual landscapes covered by snow that considers the effect of avalanches over time using a hydrostatic model.…”