Tech Report CS-03-25

Visualizing Vortices in Simulated Air Flow around Bat Wings during Flight

Eduardo Hueso

December 2003

Abstract:

We present a case study of our efforts towards building a set of data visualization tools to aid the understanding of airflow structures involved in the flight of bats. We use two visualization schemes that involve off-line computation of interesting pathlines and streamlines respectively, and an immersive virtual reality facility, CAVE, for their visualization. Hussain s et at vortex region detection technique, lambda2 is employed in our line sampling methods to emphasize vortices in the flow. Interactive control over emphasis parameters allows users to explore a continuum between localized and contextual representations of vortices. Our results, composed by two visualizations applied to a common dataset, lead to a subjective comparison between the effectiveness of pathlines and streamlines in the representation of vortices.

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