Selective Visualization of Vortices in Hydrodynamic Flows

Vortices are important features in many research and engineering fields. Visualization is an important step in gaining more understanding and control of vortices. Vortex detection criteria fall into two categories: local scalar quantities, calculated at single points, and regional geometric / kinematic criteria, calculated for e.g. streamlines. The first category is easy to compute, but does not work in all cases. The second category is more intuitive and should work in all cases, but is more difficult to compute. We try to link the two categories with our selective visualization techniques [10]. By first selecting candidate areas based on the sclar quantities, the way is paved for applying a geometric criterion. Some early applications of this approach to hydrodynamic flows are shown.

@InProceedings { SPMBP98a,
  author       = "Sadarjoen, Ari and Post, Frits H. and Ma, Bing and Banks, D.C. and Pagendarm, H.G.",
  title        = "Selective Visualization of Vortices in Hydrodynamic Flows",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings IEEE Visualization `98",
  year         = "1998",
  editor       = "D. Ebert and H. Hagen and H. Rushmeier",
  publisher    = "ACM Press, New York",
  note         = "0-8186-9176-X",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/1998/SPMBP98a"
}