fluids, ml & more

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, differentiable solvers, and machine learning for fluid mechanics.

I work on particle-based fluid simulation — how to make it faster, how to make it accurate enough to trust, and how to make it differentiable so that it can be optimized and learned from rather than only run forward.

My PhD at the University of Siegen, supervised by Prof. Andreas Kolb, was on spatially adaptive SPH: concentrating computational effort where the physics actually needs it. That line of work produced openMaelstrom, along with results on constrained neighbor lists, continuous adaptivity, and semi-analytic boundary handling.

As a postdoc at TU Munich with Prof. Nils Thuerey, I moved from building forward solvers to building solvers you can differentiate through. The result is diffSPH, a fully differentiable SPH framework in PyTorch spanning incompressible, weakly compressible and compressible schemes, which turns shape optimization, parameter estimation and closure modelling into gradient-based problems. Alongside it, SFBC (ICLR 2024) asks what the right convolution is for learning on Lagrangian particle data. I now work as a Lecturer in Engineering with AI at the University of Bristol where I continue to explore the intersection of numerics and machine learning, with a focus on differentiable solvers and data-driven closure models.

The through-line is that numerics and machine learning are worth more together than either is alone: learned components need a solver that is correct and validated before they mean anything, and classical solvers contain heuristics that are far better learned than guessed.

Browse the validation cases and datasets, read the research statement, or find the code on GitHub.

news

Mar 01, 2026 Spoke at the ERCOFTAC 2026 Conference on Machine Learning for Fluids. Slides.
Jan 12, 2026 Two papers appeared in Journal of Computational Physics vol. 555: diffSPH and analytic boundary handling in two dimensions.
Nov 03, 2025 The diffSPH16K dataset is now on Hugging Face — compressible and incompressible problems at a consistent 16K-particle resolution, for training neural surrogates.
Jun 16, 2025 Presented MoriNet — Machine Learning from a Mori-Zwanzig Perspective at the SPHERIC 2025 World Conference in Barcelona. Slides.
Jan 15, 2025 diffSPH, our fully differentiable SPH solver, is out in public beta — incompressible, weakly compressible and compressible schemes, all differentiable end to end.

selected publications

  1. paper_img_(8).png
    Semi-analytic boundary handling below particle resolution for smoothed particle hydrodynamics
    Rene Winchenbach, Rustam Akhunov, and Andreas Kolb
    ACM Trans. Graph., 2020
  2. paper_img_(11).png
    Symmetric Basis Convolutions for Learning Lagrangian Fluid Mechanics
    Rene Winchenbach, and Nils Thuerey
    In 12th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2024, Vienna, Austria, 2024
  3. diffSPH: Differentiable smoothed particle hydrodynamics for hybrid machine learning solutions in fluid mechanics
    Rene Winchenbach, and Nils Thuerey
    Journal of Computational Physics, 2026
  4. Solving boundary handling analytically in two dimensions for smoothed particle hydrodynamics
    Rene Winchenbach, and Andreas Kolb
    Journal of Computational Physics, 2026