Turbulent flows play a critical role in many fields, yet our understanding of the fundamental physics of turbulence
remains in its infancy. One of the long term goals in turbulence research is to develop an improved understanding of the
dynamic evolution, interaction and organization of vortices in three-dimensional turbulent flow. However this task is
complicated by the lack of a clear, mathematically precise definition of what a vortex is. We believe that the design of
effective methods for vortex identification and segmentation in complicated turbulent flows can be facilitated by the
clear, detailed visual presentation of the multiple scalar and vector quantities potentially relevant to the feature
identification process. In this paper, we present several different methods aimed at facilitating the integrated
understanding of a variety of local measures extracted from 3D multivariate flow data, including quantities, directions,
and orientation. A key focus of our work is on the development of methods for illustrating the local relationships
between scalar and vector values important to the vortex identification process such as vorticity, swirl, and velocity,
along with their direction and magnitude. Our methods include the use of arrows and glyphs or 3D texture along with
different color coding strategies. We demonstrate our methods on a range of data including 3D turbulent boundary flow
data and time varying ring data. The variety of multi-variate visualization methods that we have developed has
succeeded in supporting fluids researchers in their efforts to gain deeper insights into their data.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.