Visualizing results of transient flow simulations

This work briefly describes our approach to visualize results of transient flow simulations in the application areas of groundwater flow and pollutant transport as well as compressible fluid flow in engine parts. The simulations use finite element data structures and can have geometries which change over time. We designed a client-server model to handle the huge amount of data that can be obtained either directly from the simulation process or from files on disk. As standard visualization packages are not able to cope with transient unstructured data, we implemented streamlines, stream surfaces and particle systems as our main visualization methods. Our experiences and results with these techniques are discussed in this paper