SPH to Grid: a new integral conserving method

Abstract

Analysing data from Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations is about understanding global fluid properties rather than individual fluid elements. Therefore, in order to properly understand the outcome of such simulations it is crucial to transition from a particle to a grid based picture. In this paper we briefly summarise different methods of calculating a representative volume discretisation from SPH data and propose an improved version of commonly used techniques. We present a possibility to generate accurate 2D data directly without the CPU time and memory consuming detour over a 3D grid. We lay out the importance of an accurate algorithm to conserve integral fluid properties and to properly treat small scale structures using a typical galaxy simulation snapshot. For demonstration purposes we additionally calculate velocity power spectra and as expected find the main differences on small scales. Finally we propose two new multi-purpose analysis packages which utilise the new algorithms: Pygad and SPHMapper.