Gyre 27-29

"Gyre 27-29" are three related works of computational digital video meant to be displayed together. Each begins with a stratified collection of cold-hued natural colors which then systematically evolve into a disordered tangle of vortices and waves. A gyre is a circular or spiral motion or form, and the term usually refers to the largest-scale rotational motions of the Earth's oceans. These structures, like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, are large and long-lived. The colors used allow the scene to be interpreted as either motions on the global ocean or the dynamic activity of waves in a seascape. Slow, ubiquitous motion accentuates the longevity of the gyre, and careful detail implies scale.
As seen at COLLISION16:fluid at Axiom Gallery Feb-Mar 2011.

• Category

  Film & Animation

[thurmanukyalur]

Very Cool! Was this direct numerical simulation, or were there any smoothing operator assumed? Was the grid square, and if so, what scale was used relative to pixels? Did you use any adaptive mesh refinement? Sorry for all the questions, but I was curious about some of the details.

[technolope]

This is a DNS on a uniform square grid (I used muspack for the multigrid solve), and it ran at 4k2.3k before I resized it for 1080p. I am not familiar with smoothing operators, and the Reynolds number was seriously high (1M-10M maybe?), so I can't answer that question. This is not a typical velocity-pressure formulation, nor did it use standard advection methods---the CFL number peaks at 10-20.