Due to diskspace restrictions, my thesis cannot be made available electronically from this page. Please feel free to request it via email. I will happily email you my thesis as an attachment or via airmail. Chapter 1 gives an overview of previous applications of SPH and outlines many improvements that have been made to the original method. The theory upon which SPH is based is presented and the standard approach to modeling pure hydrodynamics with SPH is described in detail.
Previous work is reviewed and many new results are presented.
When using a formulation of SPH which conserves momentum exactly, the motion of the particles is observed to be unstable to negative stress. The nature of this instability is investigated and approaches which may be used to eliminate it are presented. In general it is found that the stability properties of SPH improve as higher order spline interpolant approximations to a Gaussian are used as kernels. Apart from potential numerical instabilities there are problems concerning exact conservation of momentum and energy. The maintenance of the solenoidal field is also crucial.