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HydroChrono 0.5.0 – Real-Time VSG Ocean Visualization, ChLoadHydrodynamics Added Mass & Improvements to Automated Regression Reporting

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@dav-og dav-og released this 17 Feb 14:37
· 45 commits to main since this release
v0.5.0
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🚢 HydroChrono 0.5.0

HydroChrono 0.5.0 introduces real-time free-surface visualization using VulkanSceneGraph (VSG), switches to Chrono’s native added-mass assembly, and significantly strengthens automated regression reporting.

sphere_vsg_demo.mp4

This release improves numerical consistency, visualization capability, and reproducibility while preserving the modular hydrodynamics architecture introduced in 0.4.0.

Highlights

  • Real-time VSG free-surface rendering driven directly by the wave model
  • Default added-mass assembly via ChLoadHydrodynamics
  • Legacy ChLoadAddedMass retained behind compile flag
  • Automated headless regression test reporting with PDF output
  • Multibody excitation phase bug fix
  • Full regression suite passing (Sphere, OSWEC, RM3, F3OF)

What’s New

  • Visualization

    • Animated free-surface mesh with per-vertex normals
    • Physically based rendering ocean materials and configurable grid resolution
    • Radiated wave overlay surface
    • Modular VSG components (vsg_water_surface, vsg_radiation_surface, etc.)

  • Core & Hydrodynamics

    • Default added-mass now assembled using ChLoadHydrodynamics
    • Determinism unit test across all Chrono solvers
    • Wave model extensions:
      GetElevationGradientXY()
      GetElevationForVisualization()
    • Improved irregular wave surface evaluation performance (parallelism + caching)

  • Testing & Reporting

    • Regression tests fully headless (no GUI dependency)
    • Standardised comparison plots with error metrics
    • Consolidated PDF report per test suite run
    • RM3 output retained at full double precision

  • Packaging

    • CPack bundles HydroChrono and HydroChronoGUI DLLs
    • Transitive dependency collection (Chrono, VSG, yaml-cpp, draco)
    • OpenMP runtime explicitly included
    • Fully self-contained Windows x64 distribution

Fixed

  • Regular wave excitation phase indexing for multibody systems
  • YAML runner: LoadSolverData not invoked due to structure mismatch
  • YAML runner: mesh path resolution when m_script_directory was empty
  • OSWEC solver divergence (switched from SPARSE_QR to GMRES)
  • Regression report image path handling

Known Issues

  • OSWEC validated with GMRES only (SPARSE_QR not yet confirmed stable)
  • PSOR solver incompatible with added-mass assembly
    (stiffness/damping matrix errors; other solvers pass)

Install (Windows x64)

  • Download HydroChrono-0.5.0-win64.zip

  • Unzip — all required DLLs included
    (Chrono, HDF5, yaml-cpp, VSG, MSVC runtime)

  • Run a simulation:

      .\HydroChrono.exe path\to\input_directory

  • Run the full regression suite:

      .\RUN-TESTS.ps1

HydroChrono 0.5.0 extends the 0.4.0 modular architecture with real-time visualization and stronger numerical verification infrastructure.

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