Combining mechanical properties of solids and fluids, granular materials pose important challenges for the design of algorithms for realistic animation. In this paper, we present a simulation algorithm based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) that succeeds in modeling important features of the behavior of granular materials. These features are unilateral incompressibility, friction and cohesion. We extend an existing unilateral incompressibility formulation to be added at almost no effort to an existing SPH-based algorithm for fluids. The main advantages of this extension are the ease of implementation, the lack of grid artifacts, and the simple two-way coupling with other objects. Our friction and cohesion models can also be incorporated in a seamless manner in the overall SPH simulation algorithm.

@InProceedings\{AO11,
  author       = "Alduán, Iván and Otaduy, Miguel A.",
  title        = "SPH Granular Flow with Friction and Cohesion",
  booktitle    = "Proc. of the ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation",
  year         = "2011",
  url          = "http://gmrv.es/Publications/2011/AO11"
}