A measure of spatial disorder in particle methods

In the present work we describe a numerical algorithm which gives a measure of the disorder in particle distributions in two and three dimensions. This applies to particle methods in general, disregarding the fact they use topological connections between particles or not. The proposed measure of particle disorder is tested on specific configurations obtained through the perturbation of a regular lattice. It turns out that the disorder measure may be qualitatively related to the mean absolute value of the perturbation. Finally, some applications of the proposed algorithm are shown by using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. (C) 2014 Elsevier ay. All rights reserved.