Real-time 3D Smoking Simulation Based on Computational Fluid Dynamics and GPU Computation for Virtual Surgery

Abstract

In this paper a smoking simulation model based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for virtual surgery is proposed. Navier-Stokes equations are used to model smoke as a constant and incompressible fluid. In order to realize the visual effects of real-time 3D smoking, we utilize GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) computing technology to perform the massive parallel computation by executing multithreading concurrently. The rendering of the smoke is implemented by the ray-tracing algorithm based on hardware. The visual effects of the real-time dynamic smoking simulation are given by the paper. The results show that the methods applied to the smoking simulation are elucidating and practical.