Quantifying flow field distances based on a compact streamline representation

Abstract

In many engineering domains like aerospace, vehicle or engine design the analysis of flow fields, acquired from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, can reveal important insights on the behavior of the simulated objects. However, the huge amount of flow data produced by each simulation complicates the data processing and limits the application of computational tools for flow analysis. Thus, an a priori transformation of the flow data into a compact low dimensional representation is desired. This paper introduces a new procedure for transforming flow field data into a compact streamline based representation. Wherein, streamlines with negligible information contribution are removed from the representation. The reduced set of streamlines defines the basis for a subsequent quantification of flow field distances. Experimental studies show that the distances calculated based on the compact representation well approximate the distances of the uncompressed flow field with a significant drop in memory consumption. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.