Numerical simulations of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability with the Gadget-2 SPH code

Abstract

The method of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) has been widely studied and implemented for a large variety of problems, ranging from astrophysics to fluid dynamics and elasticity problems in solids. However, the method is known to have several deficiencies and discrepancies in comparison with traditional mesh-based codes. In particular, there has been a discussion about its ability to reproduce the Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability in shearing flows. Several authors reported that they were able to reproduce correctly the instability by introducing some improvements to the algorithm. In this contribution, we compare the results of Read et al. (2010) implementation of the SPH algorithm with the original Gadget-2 N-body/SPH code.