Over at the Tecplot blog, Scott Imlay (Director of Research at Tecplot Inc) discusses a bit of what he saw at the recent VisWeek conference and in particular the “Stream Lines as Tangent Curves of a Derived Vector Field” paper by Tino Weinkauf and Holger Theisel.
What Weinhauf and Theisel did was develop an algorithm for computing, from the given vector field, a new vector field to which the streak lines are everywhere tangent. This allows streak lines to be computed in the same way as streamlines and particle paths. This is much faster (once the streak line vector field is computed) and makes a lot of additional analysis possible. The down side is that the new vector field is one dimension higher than the velocity vector field. For unsteady two-dimensional flow, the streak line vector field is four dimensional. If not done carefully, streak line computations using the new technique could be a real memory hog. Still, the benefits will probably outway the costs. Look for implementation of this new algorithm in the future
Yes it’s complicated 🙂 However, Streaklines are frequently the #1 method for visualizing flow fields. They do the best of showing time-varying data with turbulent flow, and they are relatively easy to understand. Hopefully this paper will crop us in the easy-to-use software soon and we can all check it out!
