A software system for standard presentation of flow fields in computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

A common world practice is the use of database systems for application-independent storage of business data (see [l], for example). So it would be reasonable to have similar systems in computational fluid dynamics for program-independent flow field storage and treatment. In fact, there exists a tremendous amount of programs for computational fluid dynamics that are absolutely incompatible in the form of the flow field presentation and the way of storing the results. The flow field data do differ even for close problems in the set of functions used, in the way of computational grid description, in the order of their location in the computer memory and so on. This incompatibility hampers data exchange and practical utilisation of results, necessitates a time-consuming development of numerous interfaces and graphical service programs having almost the same capabilities instead of using a small number of powerful universal tools. To avoid these disadvantages, some software systems are developed for standard presentation of multidimensional data like flow fields. An example is given by the CDF system [2] which had originally been developed to handle multidimensional geophysical data but is now successfully used in a variety of disciplines. We have developed our own software system for a standard presentation of flow fields in computational fluid dynamics. The concept of the system has been formulated in 1981-1983 and reported at ‘The VIII All-Union Seminar on the Program Packages for Mathematical Physics’ (Tashkent, 1983). The system has been implemented in 1986 and it is now extensively used in various fluid dynamics problems. Though our system was developed independently, it proved to be conceptually similar to the CDF system mentioned above. The brief comparison of the two systems is given in Appendix A.