[Paraview] particle trajectory

[Kent Eschenberg]

Hi Thierry,

Good question; I've wanted to do something similiar with time-varying 
velocities but feel we should both wait, if possible, for reasons I'll 
mention below.

There might be some confusion about the words. Here's a web page from 
Purdue that seems to do a good job of explaining streamlines, pathlines and 
streaklines (note: I don't see the Java applet that they mention).

   https://widget.ecn.purdue.edu/~meapplet/java/flowvis/Index.html

With a steady flow all are the same. The fact that you have new velocities 
at every time step indicates that you are looking at an unsteady flow where 
the 3 methods differ.

ParaView currently only supports streamlines which are not appropriate for 
unsteady flow. At best, you'd need to be very careful how you interpret 
what you see.

Time-varying velocity information could be viewed with a pathlines filter. 
The only little problem is that the VTK pipeline currently works with 
information from only one time step.

However, I understand that there is a group of VTK/ParaView developers that 
are working on a general facility for time-varying data. In addition to 
pathlines there are, I suspect, a number of other methods that need data 
from more than one time step.

If you are reading this note and are a member of this group, working on 
time-varying data, I would really appreciate you jumping in to let us all 
know the status of that effort. Can we expect to see pathlines soon? Do you 
need help?

Kent
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

--On Thursday, March 09, 2006 03:29:54 PM +0100 Thierry Dubuis 
<tdubuis at scconsultants.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I would like if it's possible to follow the particles trajectories in
> Paraview ?
> I can have access to
> 1. velocity vectors on several time step (I can use to see steamlines)
> 2. a file with the particles positions per time step.
>
> Can I load in Paraview, my file (2.) to see my particles along the time
> step ?
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> --
> Thierry Dubuis
> --------------------------------
> Sciences & Computers Consultants
> Tel : 04 77 49 75 84
> Std : 04 77 49 75 80
> Fax : 04 77 33 68 04