Topologically relevant stream surfaces for flow visualization

Ronald Peikert, Filip Sadlo
2009 Proceedings of the 2009 Spring Conference on Computer Graphics - SCCG '09  
Figure 1 : Our algorithm applied to the Lorenz dynamical system. Stable manifold of the critical point at the origin, colored by geodesic distance (left), unstable manifold of a spiral saddle critical point, colored by node index (middle), and 2D manifolds of all three critical points (right). Abstract When vector field topology is used for the visualization of a 3D vector field, various types of topological features have uniquely defined stream surfaces associated with them. Compared to
more » ... ry stream surfaces, such topology-induced stream surfaces are usually of simpler geometric shape and at the same time more expressive. We present a stream surface algorithm which robustly handles the special conditions associated with critical points and periodic orbits, such as vanishing velocity, unbounded curvature, and tightly winding spirals. We discuss error bounds and we give application examples for the range of topological features under consideration.
doi:10.1145/1980462.1980472 dblp:conf/sccg/PeikertS09 fatcat:nql3ogc3wreolafa64fs3wvh3u