Animation of groundwater flow with STRING

In order to obtain an impression of simulation results of computational fluid dynamics simulated vector and scalar fields have to be animated adequately. In cooperation with delta h Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH (Witten, Germany) the software STRING has been developed. It enables the intuitive visualization of steady-state and transient 3D groundwater data on planar and curved surfaces-even for nonprofessionals-with the help of pathlets representing the velocity field independent of the underlying (irregular) computational mesh or point cloud. STRING is influenced by ideas of the Finite Poinset Method (FPM) which has been developed at the Fraunhofer ITWM (Kaiserslautern, Germany) as an individual, independent meshfree simulation tool in fluid and continuum mechanics. Two major components of STRING are derived from this: (1) A novel, mesh-independent, intelligent, time-independent seeding strategy for the local distribution of the pathlets; (2) An FPM-specific moving weighted least squares method to determine values of vectors and scalars at certain points not included in the original data set.