Visual Analysis of Fluid Flow in a Cooling Jacket

We present a visual analysis and exploration of fluid flow through a cooling jacket. Engineers invest a large amount of time and serious effort to optimize the flow through this engine component because of its important role in transferring heat away from the engine block. In this study we examine the design goals engineers apply in order to construct, as closely as possible, the ideal cooling jacket geometry and apply a broad range of visualization tools in order to analyze, explore, and present the results. We systematically employ direct, geometric, texture-based flow visualization techniques as well as automatic feature extraction and interactive feature-based methodology and discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of these approaches as well as the challenges, both technical and perceptual involved with this application. The result is a feature rich state-of-the-art flow visualization analysis applied to an important and complex data set from real-world computational fluid dynamics simulations.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• scientific
• visualization
• flow
• vector
• field
• vis