Efficient visualization of a plasma spray simulation

Abstract

A transient particle-laden flow was analyzed using a prototype three-dimensional scientific visualization package developed to provide a high-quality image at acceptable animation rates without the use of specialized graphics hardware. The tool was designed for interactive visualizations of velocity vectors, entrained particles, and volumetric scalar data such as temperature, pressure, etc., on a domain that may be time-dependent. This software is implemented using X11/Motif for portability. The prototype was used to visualize a transient simulation of a plasma spraying process using the LAVA code in which entrained particles are modeled by a stochastic particle spray model, fully coupled to the plasma flow. The visualization tool displays important statistical information regarding particle spray characteristics including particle temperature and degree of melting. A parallel implementation using PVM software on FDDI-interconnected workstations shows some promise in extending reasonable interactive response to larger datasets.