[Paraview] Displaying strong discontinuities/XFEM

[nhodge at me.berkeley.edu]

All:

I have done a bunch of searching on google, as well as the list archives. 
The results I have found are 3-4 years old, so I thought I would ask this 
question, to see if the answer is now different . . .

How does one display strong discontinuities?  By "strong", I mean 
discontinuities in the field variables themselves (as opposed to the 
gradients).  The context is that I have an XFEM method (which represents
discontinuities along arbitrary surfaces within elements).  For 4-node
quadrilaterals in 2D, I have 4 nodal DOFs for the continuous part of the 
solution, and 4 nodal DOFs for the discontinuous part of the solution. 
Additionally, I represent the surface of discontinuity using a signed 
distance function, which is characterized by 4 nodal DOFs.

It seems like the old school solution is basically to split the elements 
which contain the discontinuity into multiple elements, the display the 
new "elements", that now have discontinuities along the inter-element 
boundaries.

I was just wondering if there is now anything that is more 
elegant/natively supported.  Thanks.

Cheers,

Neil

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Neil Hodge
Ph.D. Candidate
Computational Solid Mechanics Lab
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of California, Berkeley