Vortex Detection Through the Visualization Toolkit

Automatic vortex detection for turbo-machinery models is a complex problem but is a useful and needed tool for modelers and researchers. We have developed a suite of tools that provide access to several popular methods for vortex detection by implementing the techniques outlined in The “Parallel Vectors” Operator A Vector Field Visualization Primitive by Ronald Peikert and Martin Roth. Our software was developed using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) to provide these vortex detection capabilities to a wider range of researchers and to several existing visualization software packages, such as ParaView. We added support for both unstructured and structured datasets and can take advantage of high performance computing (HPC) resources by utilizing VTK’s multi-threading capabilities.