Particles of variable size (Q1294001)

All particle methods produce large vacuum regions when they are applied, for example, to a free gas flow. This difficulty can be avoided, however, by allowing the particles adapt their size to the local state of the fluid [the author, Numer. Math. 76, No. 1, 87-109 (1997; Zbl 0876.76067)]. This method is described in the present article in detail. It is shown that the diameter as an additional degree of freedom strongly improves the performance of numerical methods based on this particle model.