Visualization in Computational Fluid Dynamics: A Case Study

The data produced by Computational Fluid Dynamics CFD codes creates many problems for visualization systems. The data is volumetric in other words, the information of interest is throughout a volume and not just on a surface. This volume may be broken up in many different ways. The simplest form of discretization is to cut the volume into a structured set of hexahedra. On the other extreme the volume may be broken into tetrahedra in an irregular manner producing an unstructured grid. CFD applications can also produce very large data sets. For example, it is not uncommon to perform a full airplane calculation with over a million nodes. Also, researchers are now looking at 3D CFD calculations that are time varying Traditional visualization techniques based on CAD output only provide surface information and cannot give the CFD investigator much help in quickly understanding the results of these codes. Within the last couple of years graphics workstations have advanced to the point where the high-end workstations, due to their speed in both number-crunching and 3D drawing capabilities, are appropriate for interactive volumetric scientific visualization. VISUAL312 was written to take advantage of these workstations in tackling the problems of investigating the results from CFD calculations.