Layer data organization for visualizing unstructured-grid data

Kwan-Liu Ma; Gheni Abla; Eric Lum

doi:10.1117/12.424921

3 May 2001 Layer data organization for visualizing unstructured-grid data

Kwan-Liu Ma, Gheni Abla, Eric Lum

Proceedings Volume 4302, Visual Data Exploration and Analysis VIII; (2001) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.424921
Event: Photonics West 2001 - Electronic Imaging, 2001, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

Unstructured grid discretizations have become increasingly popular for computational modeling of engineering problems involving complex geometries. However, the use of 3D unstructured grids complicates the visualization task, since the resulting data sets are irregular both geometrically and topologically. The need to store and access additional information about the structure of the grid can lead to visualization algorithms which incur considerable memory and computational overhead. These issues become critical with large data sets. In this paper, we present a layer data organization technique for data from 3D aerodynamics simulations using unstructured grids. This type of simulations typically model air flow surrounding an aircraft body, and the grid resolutions are very fine near the aircraft body. Scientists are usually interested in visualizing the flow pattern near the wing, sometimes very close to the wing surface. We have designed an efficient way to generate the layer representation, and experimented it with different visualization methods, form isosurface rendering, volume rendering to texture-based vector-field visualization. We found that the layer representation facilitates interactive exploration and helps scientists to quickly find regions of interest.

Citation Download Citation

Kwan-Liu Ma, Gheni Abla, and Eric Lum "Layer data organization for visualizing unstructured-grid data", Proc. SPIE 4302, Visual Data Exploration and Analysis VIII, (3 May 2001); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.424921

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