Geometrical characteristic-based stream surface of 3D flow field

Abstract

This paper addressed a novel stream surface generation method to represent the structure of flow field smoother, feature more prominently and better visual clarity than the conventional triangulate method. To have a nice expressive force in the visualization of 3D flow field, first a strategy for adaptive streamline based on geometrical characteristic in 3D flow field space is presented to show a clear flow field pattern and the important flow features in our algorithm. Characteristics such as Euclidean distance between adjacent streamlines, curvature and torsion of each individual streamline are considered as influence factors to determine the number of seed points in the focused regions. Then, in the process of stream surface generation, an adaptive triangulation technique based on geometrical characteristic of streamlines is adopted to keep the structural continuity, smoothness, concavity and convexity of stream surface. At last, the whole algorithm is implemented using CUDA, and it can effectively shorten the lag phase appeared in the process of interaction with the control line and parameter modification. Compared with conventional triangulate method, comprehensive experiments conducted on dataset of delta-wing show that the proposed algorithm can better reflect the underlying properties of the flow field and greatly improve the readability of 3D flow field dataset.