SoliDualSPHysics: An Open-Source GPU-Accelerated SPH Framework for Solid Mechanics and Fracture

  • Moutsanidis, George (Rutgers University)
  • Rahimi, Mohammad Naqib (Synopsys Inc.)

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Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) represents a well-established meshfree method that is particularly suited for problems involving free-surface flow, complex geometrical changes, and severe material distortion. While SPH has been widely and successfully applied to fluid dynamics and fluid–structure interaction problems, its application to standalone solid mechanics and physically consistent fracture modeling remains relatively limited. In particular, brittle fracture capabilities are almost entirely absent from current open-source and high-performance SPH software, where existing approaches often rely on ad hoc damage models and phenomenological failure criteria. This presentation introduces SoliDualSPHysics, a novel open-source and GPU-accelerated software that extends DualSPHysics to enable the numerical simulation of nonlinear solid mechanics and brittle fracture within a unified SPH formulation. The methodology relies on a total Lagrangian SPH approach that allows the direct application of external loads and boundary conditions, enabling standalone solid mechanics simulations. Brittle fracture is modeled through a phase-field approach coupled with SPH, allowing crack initiation, propagation, branching, and coalescence under dynamic loading without the need for additional criteria, local refinement, or explicit tracking of evolving discontinuities [2,3]. The framework further includes support for user-defined mathematical expressions to prescribe space- and time-dependent quantities, enhancing flexibility across existing and future DualSPHysics applications. The proposed framework is verified and validated against established numerical benchmarks and available experimental results. A dedicated performance study is also presented, in which the GPU-accelerated implementation is shown to achieve substantial speedups, enabling efficient large-scale simulations involving a large number of particles. The presented software provides an extensible and high-performance computational tool for large-scale solid mechanics and brittle fracture simulations, and aims to facilitate reproducibility and further development by the meshfree community.