Fast Particle-based Visual Simulation of Ice Melting

Abstract

The visual simulation of natural phenomena has been widely studied. Although several methods have been proposed to simulate melting, the flows of meltwater drops on the surfaces of objects are not taken into account. In this paper, we propose a particle-based method for the simulation of the melting and freezing of ice objects and the interactions between ice and fluids. To simulate the flow of meltwater on ice and the formation of water droplets, a simple interfacial tension is proposed, which can be easily incorporated into common particle-based simulation methods such as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. The computations of heat transfer, the phase transition between ice and water, the interactions between ice and fluids, and the separation of ice due to melting are further accelerated by implementing our method using CUDA. We demonstrate our simulation and rendering method for depicting melting ice at interactive frame-rates.