Lead Investigators : Drs. Chandra, Gelb and van Dommelen
Scientific visualization is an essential tool to interpret the possibly terabytes of data resulting from advanced numerical simulations in all areas of computational mechanics. Displacement and stress fields in a deforming solid; pressure, velocity and vorticity fields in acoustics and in blood flow in arteries and organs are all massive numerical vector fields that need to be displayed, manipulated, and analyzed. Great synergy can be achieved by addressing this very labor-intensive task as a group, rather than as individual researchers.
A large number of effective visualization tools have been developed over the years, using large scale computers as well as workstations. Many are not hardware independent and need tweaking before they can be put to use. The problems become even more significant if it is not a priori clear what the key output needs to be and full, large, data sets must be browsed in space, time or variable domain.