A new Particle Vortex Method, called Diffused Vortex Hydrodynamics (DVH), is presented in this paper. The DVH is a meshless method characterized by the use of a regular distribution of points close to a solid surface to perform the vorticity diffusion process in the boundary layer regions. This redistribution avoids excessive clustering or rarefaction of the vortex particles providing robustness and high accuracy to the method. The generation of the regular distribution of points is performed through a packing algorithm which is embedded in the solver. The packing algorithm collocates points regularly around body of arbitrary shape allowing an exact enforcement on the solid surfaces of the no-slip boundary condition. The present method is tested and validated on different problems of increasing complexities up to flows with Reynolds number equal to 100,000 (without using any subgrid-scale turbulence model).

To model the viscous effect, the core area of particles in Leonard's core spreading vortex method must grow linearly in time, which however results in growing convective errors and consequently causes the failure of a correct convergence of the method to the Navier-Stokes equations. The so-called diffusion vortex method was proposed and claimed to have smaller core-area growth rates because part of the viscous effect is modeled into the movement of particles. The growth rates however are non-uniform and an additional diffusion error arises due to the nonzero divergence of the diffusion velocity. The goal of this work is to analyze the associated errors of several existing versions of the diffusion vortex method and compare them with that of Leonard's. Simulations of two axisymmetric flows are performed to measure the involved diffusion errors and consequently distinguish these diffusion vortex methods. The results show that the circulation conservation is important, besides a small core-area growth rate, in obtaining a good accuracy. Under the consideration of both efficiency and accuracy, the diffusion vortex method in which each vortex particle conserves its own circulation on its core area alone is recommended.