A STUDY TO SURFACE VISUALIZATION OF 3-D FLOW

Along with the improvement of computing technology and engineering requirements, 3-D hydrodynamic numerical simulation is adopted partly in research area of water transportation and makes great progress. At the same time, it proposed requirements to 3-D flow simulation. Carrying out visualization method to computation data becomes more urgent, and research on 3-D flow visualization is an essential one. Visualization of 3-D surface is an important way to discover the 3-D flow, which conforms to people's cognition habits to 3-D flow characteristics in the nature world. Based on the lightweight 3-D graphic engine, a program called SS3D is developed with visual C#. SS3D sets up 3-D virtual scene with the numerical model. It can be used to do interpolation of spatial-temporal discretization to computation results with efficient algorithms. Meanwhile it carries out 3-D particle tracing for surface flow with Lagrangian law and assists with semitransparent 3-D geometric surface to express the water surface. Also it makes the tracing particles be displayed on the water surface, thus, makes the 3-D display effect achieved optimization. By demonstration of living examples, it shows that visualization effect of the surface flow is satisfactory; the study achieves the expected effect and has promoting effect on 3-D hydrodynamic simulation.