Particles of variable size

A problem of all particle methods is that they produce large vacuum regions when they are applied to a free gas flow, for example. With the approach recently proposed by the author [Numer. Math. (1997) 76: 111–142], this difficulty can be avoided. One can let the particles adapt their size to the local state of the fluid. How, is described in the present article. The diameter as an additional degree of freedom strongly improves the performance of the numerical methods based on this particle model.