Are heuristic switches necessary to control dissipation in modern smoothed particle hydrodynamics?

¹ Departament de Física. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Av. Eduard Maristany 16, 08019 Barcelona, Spain
² Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC), 08860 Castelldefels (Barcelona), Spain
³ Center for Scientific Computing – sciCORE, University of Basel, Klingelberstrasse 61, 4056 Basel, Switzerland
⁴ Center for Data Analytics – CEDA, University of Basel, 4056 Basel, Switzerland

^★ Corresponding authors: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 22 October 2025
Accepted: 24 February 2026

Abstract

Context. Artificial viscosity is commonly employed in smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to model dissipation in hydrodynamic simulations. However, its practical implementation today relies, in many cases, on complex numerical switches to restrict its application to regions where dissipation is physically warranted, such as shocks. These switches, while essential, are imperfect and can introduce additional numerical noise.

Aims. We investigated an efficient shock capture scheme for SPH that does not rely on artificial viscosity switches. The advantages of the proposed scheme have been validated through a representative number of test cases.

Methods. Recent studies have proposed that subtracting the linear component of the velocity field can suppress spurious dissipation in shear-dominated regions. Building on this idea, we implemented a velocity-reconstruction technique that removes the bulk linear motion from the local velocity field and uses the Balsara correction to modulate the dissipation.

Results. The methodology presented here yields a balanced dissipation scheme that performs well across a range of regimes, including subsonic instabilities, shear flows, and strong shocks. We demonstrate that this approach yields improved accuracy and lower spurious dissipation, compared to the reference viscosity switch used in this work.