However, the SPH formulation also faces a few challenges. Several notable problems potentially hamper further exploiation of the method, such as accuracy, tensile instability,
[31-33] pairing instability,
[34] the kernel as well as particle consistency,
[8, 35-38] and artificial viscosity.
[39] From a physical viewpoint, tensile instability is triggered when SPH particles become mutually attractive due to, by and large, the presence of negative pressure. The eventual instability manifested regarding particle distribution, known as tensile instability, can be viewed as equivalent to the mesh distortion in a mesh-based scenario, is typically found in simulations of elastic material under tension. One possible approach to deal with such instability associated with irregular particle distribution is to sacrifice exact conservation of the algorithm by a slim amount.
[40] Besides, other approaches were proposed to handle the instability by improving the estimation of spatial gradients, such as the corrected derivatives method.
[41] As the number of neighbors of an individual SPH particle increases, the ratio of the particle spacing to the smoothing length decreases. However, for standard "Bell-shaped" or "Gaussian-like" kernels, their first derivative, and equivalently the force between SPH particles, vanishes at the origin. Consequently, particle pairing occurs. This problem is relatively benign, as it usually does not lead to any severe consequence. It can mostly be avoided by just using an adequate initial particle distribution with a smaller number of neighbors or adopting a short-range kernel function. Concerning kernel and particle consistency, much effort has been devoted to restore the consistency and subsequently improve accuracy. Monaghan derived a symmetrization formulation for the spatial gradient term
[3] consistent with the variational approach, which is shown to provide better accuracy. Randles and Libersky proposed a normalization scheme for the density approximation.
[35] The concept is further developed by Chen $et al.$
[33, 36, 42] in terms of a corrective smoothed particle method (CSPM) as well as by Liu $et al.$
[37] in terms of a finite particle method (FPM). For some physical phenomena such as shockwave, the entropy is increased as a physical consequence. In fact, unlike in a Eulerian scheme where numerical dissipation is an intrinsic feature related to the discretization process and mostly unavoidable, diffusion terms in SPH must be inserted explicitly, and as a result, their physical content is transparent. In this regard, it has been argued that it is essential to supply an adequate amount of artificial viscosity which works for not only scenarios where artificial viscosity is required but also for other cases where its presence ought to be minimized.
[43, 44]