Extracting 3D vortices in turbulent fluid flow

This paper presents a computational framework to extract salient patterns, called vortex structures, from 3D turbulent fluid flows. These structures can be characterized as regions of dominating rotational motion in the velocity fields and intensity concentrations in the corresponding vorticity fields. A pointwise linear representation is employed to approximate the kinematics of the flow field, and the fluid motion is classified according to motion analysis or topological patterns. The regions of vortex structures are identified as those dominated by rotational motion or those of focus-type singularity. The 2D vortices, as a special case of 3D vortices, are detected by searching for regions of vorticity concentrations.