Stream surfaces are a classic flow visualization technique used to portray the characteristics of vector fields, and texture advection research has made rapid advances in recent years. We present a novel hybrid visualization of texture advection on stream surfaces. This approach conveys properties of the vector field that stream surfaces alone cannot. We apply the visualization technique to various patterns of flow from CFD data important to automotive engine simulation including two patterns of in-cylinder flow (swirl and tumble motion) as well as flow through a cooling jacket. In addition, we explore multiple vector fields defined at the stream surface such as velocity, vorticity, and pressure gradient. The results of our investigation highlight both the strengths and limitations of the hybrid stream surface-texture advection visualization technique and offer new insight to engineers exploring and analyzing their simulations.

We present a visual analysis and exploration of fluid flow through a cooling jacket. Engineers invest a large amount of time and serious effort to optimize the flow through this engine component because of its important role in transferring heat away from the engine block. In this study we examine the design goals that engineers apply in order to construct an ideal-as-possible cooling jacket geometry and use a broad range of visualization tools in order to analyze, explore, and present the results. We systematically employ direct, geometric, and texture-based flow visualization techniques as well as automatic feature extraction and interactive feature-based methodology. And we discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of these approaches as well as the challenges, both technical and perceptual with this application. The result is a feature-rich state-of-the-art flow visualization analysis applied to an important and complex data set from real-world computational fluid dynamics simulations.

We investigate two important, common fluid flow patterns from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, namely, swirl and tumble motion typical of automotive engines. We study and visualize swirl and tumble flow using three different flow visualization techniques: direct, geometric, and texture-based. When illustrating these methods side-by-side, we describe the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach within a specific spatial dimension and across multiple spatial dimensions typical of an engineer's analysis. Our study is focused on steady-state flow. Based on this investigation we offer perspectives on where and when these techniques are best applied in order to visualize the behavior of swirl and tumble motion.