PROCESSING OF COMPUTED VECTOR-FIELDS FOR VISUALIZATION

This paper describes several methods of visualizing the vector fields in a flow analysis. A class of computational algorithms determining the structure of vector fields are stated. These algorithms can be applied to other areas of computational physics. The first part of the paper concentrates on a formulation of the problem. Usually the objective vector fields are obtained on a discretized space. This makes it difficult to construct the computational algorithms. An appropriate interpolation method has to be chosen in order to reconstruct a continuous space. Since the reconstructed space is defined locally, a grid cell in which the solution moves must be found by the efficient algorithm. This becomes a crucial problem in three dimensions. The construction of schemes is performed on both physical and computational spaces in order to overcome such difficulty. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.