Visualizing the Long-term Behavior of 3D Fluid Flows (Introduction Talk)

The study of the long-term behavior of 3D fluid flows can provide useful insights into transport phenomena, which are of central importance in many fields, such as medicine and engineering.  Such a study is normally based on the integration of the flow field.  The resulting integral structures are indeed highly expressive, but their direct visualization often suffers from cluttering and occlusion issues. 

In this talk I will present my recent (and future) work addressing this problem.  Three projects will be covered: (1) A seeding strategy for families of integral surfaces, which captures the predominant aspects of the long-term flow behavior.  (2) A technique for easing the investigation and comparison of surface families, based on a 2D reformation process.  (3) The work I am carrying out here at the TU, aimed at quantifying transport phenomena and depicting them using Sankey diagrams.