A new doubly discrete analogue of smoke ring flow and the real time simulation of fluid flow
Ulrich Pinkall, Boris Springborn, Steffen Weißmann · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical · 2007
Modelling incompressible ideal fluids as a finite collection of vortex filaments is important in physics (super-fluidity, models for the onset of turbulence) as well as for numerical algorithms used in computer graphics for the real time simulation of smoke. Here we introduce a time-discrete evolution equation for arbitrary closed polygons in 3-space that is a discretization of the localized induction approximation of filament motion. This discretization shares with its continuum limit the property that it is a completely integrable system. We apply this polygon evolution to a significant improvement of the numerical algorithms used in computer graphics.