PV3 at the Princeton CFD Laboratory

The scientific activity in the CFD laboratory in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton is centered on the development of advanced computational simulation techniques in the aerodynamic design of modern aircraft, and the prediction hydrodynamic performance of ships. Computer codes based on on both structured body-fitted meshes and unstructured tetrahedral meshes have been developed in the past fifteen years. These generate a large amount of data that needs to be postprocessed. Thus, visualization plays a major role in the analysis of computed flow fields. Also, parallel computers have enabled the development of automatic design optimization techniques. The costs of, and the amount of data generated by these calculations is orders of magnitude larger than that generated by a simple analysis run. Thus, data visualization is paramount for all the research conducted in our CFD laboratory. This paper describes some of our typical CFD applications, and the use of PV3 which is used for the visualization of the computed flow.