Abstract
A new visualization technique was developed for a three-dimensional numerical flow simulation. This method is a kind of tracer visualizations, and based on a principle where we can actually perceive a fluid motion through smoke. In this method, several millions of transformable surface elements are released into a computational domain instead of particle tracers, and lighting and transparency effects of each surface element are considered in the visualization. By means of this visualization method, we managed to give three-dimensional effects to tracing visualization methods. In this paper, we tried to visualize some numerical flows using this method. Numerical simulations were carried out by DNS, and a few representative flow phenomena were employed. In particular, we could observe existence of complicated three-dimensional flow structures and turbulence transitions through natural convection and channel turbulence problems. As a result, we confirmed that this visualization method is quite effective for understanding three-dimensional flow structures.
