Computational Multi-Field Visualization

Abstract

Computational field problems, such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), electromagnetic field simulation, and weather modeling—essentially any problems whose physics can be modeled effectively by ordinary and/or partial differential equations—constitute the majority of computational science and engineering simulations.  The output of such simulations might be a single field variable (such as pressure or velocity) or a combination of fields involving a number of scalar fields, vector fields, and/or tensor fields.  As such, scientific visualization researchers have concentrated on effective ways to visualize large-scale computational fields.  Much current and previous visualization research has focused on methods and techniques for visualizing a computational field variable (such as the extraction of a single scalar field variable as an isosurface).  While single variable visualization often satisfies the needs of the user, it is clear that it would also be useful to be able to effectively visualize multiple fields simultaneously.

In this talk I will describe some of our recent work in scalar, vector, and tensor visualization techniques as applied to the domain of computational field problems.  I will end with a discussion of ideas for the integration of techniques for creating computational multi-field visualizations.