Interactive Stream Surface Placement - A Hybrid Clustering Approach Supported by Tree Maps

Abstract

The ability of a CFD engineer to study, capture, and visualise multi-field, 3D flow simulation data is a challenge. Stream surfaces are a useful tool for visualising 3D flow because of their ability to convey many field attributes from their structure. It is important that the CFD engineer can interact with, and examine specific characteristics of the CFD data. We introduce an interactive, cluster based stream surface placement strategy for structured and unstructured CFD data. A two-phase hybrid clustering algorithm is used to visualise interesting subsets of the flow. An interactive tree map interface provides a visual overview and enables interactive selection of cluster details corresponding to interesting features of the data at which to place stream surfaces. We demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of our interactive framework on a range of flow simulations and provide domain expert evaluation of the results, providing valuable insight for the CFD engineers.