Visualizing Unsteady Flows by Adaptive Streaklines

Abstract

The visualization of unsteady flows is an attractive field of research and texture-based techniques seem to provide satisfactory results. In this paper we propose a texture-based method which follows streaklines in order to produce an effective visualization of time-dependent phenomena. The local vorticity of the field allows to trace a number of streaklines according to the flow characteristics; in this way, more significant areas are denoted by a higher level of detail. Moreover, different colors are assigned to different vorticity levels to better denote flow instabilities.