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Rendering technique of multi-layered domain boundaries and its application to fluid flow in porous media visualizations

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Abstract

Current visualization techniques for computational fluid dynamics applications are sophisticated and work well in simple geometries. For complex geometries such as pore spaces, multiple domain boundaries obstruct the view and make the studying of fluid flow fields difficult. To overcome these deficiencies, we use two-sided materials to render the domain boundaries. Using this technique, it is possible to place the camera inside the domain and have a non-obstructed view of the surrounding flow field without losing spatial reference to the domain boundaries. As a result, a larger part of fluid flow visualization is visible. Two-sided material rendering was successfully applied to display still images with Blender Cycles renderer, in a virtual reality environment, and several implementation techniques were explored for using the Visualization Toolkit.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Thomas Nagel, Carolin Helbig, Jens-Olaf Delfs and Norbert Böttcher, who provided valuable ideas to the writing of this paper, and Leslie Jakobs for proofreading. The presented work has been partly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as a part of the GEOTECHNOLOGIEN Program. The conceptual development as well as visualization methodologies of this work are also incorporated into the A-DuR (Grant ID: 02E10588), CO2BENCH (Grant ID: 03G0797D) and INFLUINS projects (Grant ID: 03IS2091D), funded by BMBF.

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Correspondence to Dmitri Naumov.

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Naumov, D., Bilke, L. & Kolditz, O. Rendering technique of multi-layered domain boundaries and its application to fluid flow in porous media visualizations. Environ Earth Sci 72, 3795–3802 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-014-3445-9

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