I want to ask if I can use Blender as a fluid dynamics simulator in a physics school investigation to determine for example the space travelled by a particle moving through a fluid, varying the viscosity. First of all, I watched some tutorials about fluid physics and I thought it could be suitable for this experiment, the problem I found is that I cannot determine in a scientifical way the space travelled by the particle. Also, I don't know how to give to the particle a determined speed value.
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2 Answers
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It really depends what exactly you are looking for. Blender simulations are mostly for cool animations and VFX, and I personally wouldn't count on it for very specific scientific simulations. If you are looking to simulate a simple wind tunnel, it could work just fine. For your project, I don't know specifically if it would work, because to my knowledge Blender's fluid engine does not support variable viscosity, nor will the object interacting with the fluid be realistically affected by a collision. The fluid will look neat, but it won't be a truly realistic simulation of reality.
answered Jan 25, 2019 at 18:46
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(This answer was updated for Blender V4.0 and higher on 2023-12-20)
As it was mentioned above, it depends on what you want to do.
If you want to go all scientific and have simulation data that you want to analyze, then you should use a free software called DualSPHysics, http://dual.sphysics.org/, which specifically deals with fluid dynamics. They are using it to simulate sea shore erosion, brake wall effectiveness and so on. Here is an example for usage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvSDFRfJToQ or in Blender https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6lloRvgoXA. There is also a Blender plugin for this software which is called VisualSPHysics, https://github.com/EPhysLab-UVigo/VisualSPHysics. If you actually want to analyze the data then you may need to also use a software called ParaView, https://www.paraview.org/, which is a data analysis software. You can see what happens to velocities, pressures and a multitude of info.
If only accurate visuals are the main objective, then from blender V2.82 and up has a new fluid, smoke and fire simulation engine called Mantaflow based on the FLIP solver. Mantaflow replaces the old fluid simulation engine which used the Lattice Boltzmann based method of particle based fluid simulations, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_Boltzmann_methods. Blender V2.82 vanilla version and up, already ships with the Mantaflow solver.
There is also a paid plugin for fluid simulations called FLIP Fluids, https://blendermarket.com/products/flipfluids, which is a matured plugin for Blender V2.8 and up. Mantaflow is like FLIP Fluids but it is capable to do more then the paid one. Mantaflow can also deal with smoke simulations, whereas FLIP Fluids exclusively deals with fluids only. Mantaflow can now deal with viscosity changes just like FLIP Fluid can. However, FLIP Fluids has a more advanced liquid simulation engine. Here are some demos that users created with the FLIP Fluids blender addon, https://youtu.be/KH1faiqE1d4 or another one https://youtu.be/FARyt4s3T7E
FLIP Fluids and Mantaflow are using very similar methods of calculating the fluid dynamics. They both use a FLIP solver, which is a type of hybrid between a particle based and volume based fluid simulation. The FLIP abreviation comes from the FLluid Implicit Particle solver definition. It can generate Foam, Bubbles, Spray and it is faster than the SPH solver system, discussed below.
DualSPHysics uses Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, SPH, to solve fluid dynamics problems which can also be used to simulate other than fluids such as solid mechanics, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothed-particle_hydrodynamics. This fluid dynamics solver is a volume based simulation. It creates accurate simulation data that can be later analyzed either numerically or visually with external software such as PraView, see above. Because it provides detailed calculation data it can be 10-100 times slower then the FLIP method but it is the ideal one for research.
Hope this extra info will help you out with your project.
