An evaluation of smoothed particle hydrodynamics

We present several sample problems calculated by the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. These problems illustrate its utility as a general purpose computational fluid dynamics technique. The SPH method has great potential for development into an alternative to finite difference and finite element methods. It has received much less development effort than the other methods, but even in its present form it is a useful tool for getting approximate solutions to a wide variety of three-dimensional fluid dynamics problems at moderate computational cost.