Streamlines Placement For 3D Flow Fields

Flow visualization is a hot topic in the research of scientific visualization. And streamline is a popular way to visualize flow fields. Currently, most of the flow visualization techniques based on streamlines are aimed for 2D flow field. Although some streamline placement methods have been proposed for 3D flow field, there isn't an ideal solution.In this paper, we studied the feature-based streamline placement method for 3D flow field as well as a 3D streamline placement method that is independent of flow features. This paper has accomplished the following work:(1) The feature extraction of flow topology and vortex is analyzed in this paper, after reviewing the development of flow visualization.(2) Combined with the information of flow features, this paper proposed a streamline placement method for 3D flow field that is guided by flow features. Firstly, this method extracts the critical points of the 3D flow field. Then, under the control of a control grid, different seed templates are used to place initial streamlines near different critical points. Finally, additional streamlines are placed within the remaining areas using a uniform placement strategy.(3) A 3D streamline placement method based on uniform placement strategy is proposed in this paper. This method is extended from a 2D streamline placement method. The newly proposed method can generate streamlines that are uniformly distributed as possible. Moreover, by constructing a control grid, this method can adaptively select seed points and control the density of streamlines without any information about flow fields.(4) To speed up the computation of streamline placement, a simple parallel strategy is proposed for the placement of streamlines in 3D flow fields.(5) Finally, a software tool has been developed to implement the 3D streamline placement methods that are discussed in this paper.