Flow visualization and field line advection in computational fluid dynamics: Application to magnetic fields and turbulent flows

Scientific visualization of these fields can be a powerful aid in their understanding. However, numerous pitfalls present themselves ranging from computational performance to the challenge of generating insightful visual representations of the data.

In this paper, we briefly survey current practices for visualizing 3D vector fields, placing particular emphasis on those data arising from CFD simulations of turbulence. We describe the capabilities of a vector field visualization system that we have implemented as part of an open source visual data analysis environment. We also describe a novel algorithm we have developed for illustrating the advection of one vector field by a second flow field.