What do fluid-implicit particle solvers, video gaming, hydroinformatics, and ecohydraulics have in common and can a video-game engine become a hydraulic laboratory or even replace state-of-the art numerical simulations of surface waters?
Explore answers to this question in our new #open-access article in the Journal of Hydroinformatics: “Fluid-implicit particle solvers in a video gaming engine provide new perspectives in hydroinformatics”
https://doi.org/10.2166/hydro.2026.133
We used Unreal Engine’s Niagara Fluids to simulate flow through a vertical-slot fishway at low, average, and flood discharges. The results were compared with physical flume experiments and matched-resolution OpenFOAM simulations.
Key findings:
- Water depths were within ±10% equivalence margins in most testable cases.
- Simulations ran roughly an order of magnitude faster than OpenFOAM in the hardware environments tested.
- Immersive 3d visualization, partcel-level post-processing, and a demonstrative virtual trout agent revealed new possibilities for hydraulic analysis and communication.
Velocity predictions remain more challenging, particularly near high-velocity jets, sharp slot corners, and particle-sparse regions. Game-engine solvers are therefore not yet a replacement for established CFD, but they could become a powerful complementary tool for rapid exploration, visualization, training, and digital twins.
A big thank-you to Benni Kemmler, Federica Scolari, Kenneth Larrieu, and Gregory Pasternack for this collaboration - not to forget the collaborators in our hydraulic laboratory back in 2025 when we collected the calibration data for these models, especially Stefan Haun and Gerhard Schmid. Big thank you to Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - German Research Foundation for the funding and the Landeshauptstadt München Baureferat who was case giver for this work!