1

I am simulating the case "Cavity driven lid" and I try to get all the stream lines with the stream tracer of paraview, but I only get the ones that intersect the reference line, and because of that there are vortices that are not visible. How can I see all the stream-lines in the domain?

Thanks a lot in adavance.

2 Answers2

1

To add a little bit to Mathieu's answer, if you really want streamlines everywhere, then you can create a Stream Tracer With Custom Source (as Mathieu suggested) and set your data to both the Input and the Seed Source. That will create a streamline originating from every point in your dataset, which is pretty much what you asked for.

However, while you can do this, you will probably not be happy with the results. First of all, unless your data is trivially small, this will take a long time to compute and create a large amount of data. Even worse, the result will be so dense that you won't be able to see anything. You will get all those interesting streamlines through vortices, but they will be completely hidden by all the boring streamlines around them.

Thus, you are better off with trying to derive a data set that contains seed points that are likely to trace a stream through the vortices that you are interested in. One thing you might want to try is to compute the vorticity of your vector field (Gradient Of Unstructured Data Set when turning on advanced option Compute Vorticity), find the magnitude of that (Calculator), and then use the Threshold filter to pull out the cells with large vorticity. Then use that as your Seed Source.

Another (probably better) option if your data is 2D or you can extract an interesting surface along the flow of your data is to use the Surface LIC plugin. Details can be found at https://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Line_Integral_Convolution.

0

You have to choose a representative source for your streamline. You could use a "Sphere Source", so in the StreamTracer properties.

If that fails, you can use a StreamTracerWithCustomSource and use your own source that you will have to create yourself first.

Mathieu Westphal
  • 2,544
  • 1
  • 19
  • 33