Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2007/08 - Gruppe 02 - Aufgabe 1 - Flow Visualization
What is flow visualization?
As we are human beings who live on earth, we are familiar with all the elements and forces that affect our lives constantly. Thus most of us roughly know some things about fluids too. Everyone has at least once seen how water whirls in a bathtub when it runs out or how wind blows leaves around in autumn forming kind of a small vortex. We all know pictures of a cloud formed like a mushroom after the explosion of an atomic bomb. Obviously we are acquainted with the flow of fluids though we can’t actually see many of them because they are transparent, i.e. air, water or gas. We do also know how to describe the fluid motion by mathematical equations but the problem is that these are far too difficult to be computed by humans. We can only try to solve these equations via using numerical calculators, i.e. very fast computer algorithms. But even the numerical results are only estimations and may not correspond to natural processes until they have been approved by physical experiments. So, in order to understand what is going on we need to find ways to make visible what cannot be actually perceived by the human eye.
Definition
References
- [Merzkirch, 1987] Wolfgang Merzkirch. Flow Visualization, Second Edition. Academic Press Inc. Ltd., London, 1987.
- [Devenport and Hartwell, 2006] W.J. Devenport and W.L. Hartwell, Experiment 1 - Flow Visualization. Last modified at: December 20, 2006. Retrieved at: November 9, 2007. http://www.aoe.vt.edu/~devenpor/aoe3054/manual/expt1/index.html.