Analysis Enhanced Particle-based Flow Visualization

Particle-based fluid simulation (PFS), such as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and Position-based Fluid (PBF), is a mesh-free method that has been widely used in various fields, including astrophysics, mechanical engineering, and biomedical engineering for the study of liquid behaviors under different circumstances. Due to its meshless nature, most analysis techniques that are developed for mesh-based data need to be adapted for the analysis of PFS data. In this work, we study a number of flow analysis techniques and their extension for PFS data analysis, including the FTLE approach, Jacobian analysis, and an attribute accumlation framework. In particular, we apply these analysis techniques to free surface fluids. We demonstrate that these analyses can reveal some interesting underlying flow patterns that would be hard to see otherwise via a number of PFS simulated flows with different parameters and boundary settings. In addition, we point out that an in-situ analysis framework that performs these analyses can potentially be used to guide the adaptive PFS to allocate the computation and storage power to the regions of interest during the simulation.