[Paraview] File Format for Particles

[Shi Jin]

Hi there,

I am doing a simulation of fluid-particle interactions, in which I generate a lot of data for particles. I am looking for the efficient file format to store my particle information for visualization with paraview. For example, is there a file format that allows me to store all the particle information at a given time in a single ascii file, which looks like
#1-id 2-radius 3-rho_p 4-fixed 5-x 6-y 7-z 8-u 9-v 10-z 11-w1 12-w2 13-w3 14-alpha 15-theta 17-phi
0 0.500000 1.200000 0 2.077176 2.678227 8.649375 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
1 0.500000 0.800 0 2.728281 0.873571 6.806029 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
...

I guess for the purpuse of visualization, we need radius, rho_p(for color), x,y and z at least. The rotation information would be nice to have but is considered optional at this stage. 

I am thinking to save different time results in different files to make the loading efficient in terms of memory since I have a lot of particles here. Then we can produce animation using time control. I guess we could use VTK formats but that has lots of redundant information.

I saw some very early discussion on a similar topic in the forum but didn't get the conclusive answer. I would appreciate some advice for the current version of paraview.

Thank you very much.

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Shi Jin, PhD