Unsteady Flow Visualization via Physics Based Pathline Exploration

Abstract

This work proposes to analyze the time-dependent characteristics of the physical attributes measured along pathlines derived from unsteady flows, which can be represented as a series of time activity curves (TAC). A new TAC-based unsteady flow visualization and analysis framework is proposed. The center of this framework is a new event-based distance metric (EDM) that compares the similarity of two TACs, from which a new spatio-temporal, hierarchical clustering of pathlines based on their physical attributes and an attribute-based pathline exploration are proposed. These techniques are integrated into a visual analytics system, which has been applied to a number of unsteady flow in 2D and 3D to demonstrate its utility.