Visualization´s role in analyzing computational fluid dynamics data

Visualization has fueled the growth and understanding of many scientific and engineering fields. In computational fluid dynamics, for example, engineers now use numerical calculations to accurately simulate many engineering problems that once required the use of physical experiments involving wind and water tunnels. CFD has come to serve as an instrument in the design of many familiar engineering processes. These developments have produced massive amounts of data for analysis. Feature detection has become a critical tool in understanding key structures within these volumes of data. We briefly discuss the growth of CFD and investigate why feature detection and visualization have become such a vital part of analyzing CFD simulation results.