Description

In this video, we introduce the use of georeferenced images in Tecplot 360. For datasets that represent a geographic region, a georeferenced image gives additional context to help communicate the location for your data.

We start with a dataset already open, which are results from the Salish Sea model courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Labs. The Salish Sea is situated along southwestern British Columbia and northwestern Washington State. Without a background map the geography is difficult to ascertain when looking at this model.

To better understand our region, we will import a georeferenced image via Insert > Image/Georeferenced Image… Note that you can also use the image insertion tool on the toolbar.

World Files

A georeferenced image consists of an image file and a world file. Tecplot 360 supports JPG, PNG, and BMP image formats. The world file defines the coordinates for where the image should be placed. Tecplot 360 is unit agnostic, so make sure that your world file is in the same coordinate system as your data. This model uses UTM 10, so our world file is also UTM 10.

Once the image is loaded it is placed in the plot with your data. In this case we’re in a 3D Cartesian view so the image is an actual 3D object which will rotate with the data. As we animate through time notice that the tide drops below our image. To adjust the Z-value of the image, right-click on the image and select Image details…. Note that you can also launch this dialog by double-clicking on the image. Use the slider or text field to adjust the image to a lower location – in this case we’ll use -15. Now you can animate and the surface temperature is no longer covered by the image.

Georeferenced images may also be used in 2D plots. In this case you likely no longer need the axes so you may want to disable the axes and increase the extents of the viewport to use the entirety of the frame. In 2D there is no Z adjustment as the image is always drawn behind the data.

This concludes the tutorial for georeferenced images in Tecplot 360.

Thank you for watching!

Try Tecplot 360 for Free

The post Georeferenced Images in Tecplot 360 appeared first on Tecplot.

Load netCDF data with FVCOM loader, import georeferenced images and shapefiles, compute vertical transects

BELLEVUE, WA (October 17, 2018) – Tecplot, Inc. has announced the general availability of Tecplot 360 2018 Release 2.

This release will benefit geoscientists who work with results from numerical models such as FVCOM (Finite-Volume Community Ocean Model), ROMS (Regional Ocean Modeling System), WRF (Weather Research Forecasting Model) and Telemac (Loaders for ROMS, WRF and Telemac are available upon request, contact support@tecplot.com). Highlights that will benefit general Tecplot customers include new colormaps, handy Python scripts, updated Excel add-in, and a CONVERGE output file loader. See all of what is new.

“In our research [of the Geoscience market], we’ve found that most geoscientists spend an inordinate amount of time writing and modifying scripts to evaluate their simulation output,” says Scott Fowler, Tecplot 360 Product Manager. “We’ve also found that many with 3D model results are missing important features in their data because they use tools that do not easily support viewing and exploring the full 3D data.”

Georeferenced image of Puget Sound (Salish Sea) with vertical transect. Image created with Tecplot 360

Unlike script-based post-processing, Tecplot 360 allows geoscientists to quickly view and analyze full 3D models in an interactive user interface – without the need to write scripts. Tecplot 360 allows a quick and thorough exploration of XY, 2D and 3D results, which ensures that important information is neither missed nor overlooked.

Automation can speed analysis, and Tecplot 360 has a rich Python API known as PyTecplot. The Tecplot 360 Python API can generate images, movies and perform advanced analysis. Python scripts may be recorded based on user actions, which accelerates understanding of the API.

Unlike open-source solutions, Tecplot 360 comes with a responsive and knowledgeable Technical Support Team.  Tecplot’s website reports a 96.4% response time within one business day, and a 61.3% immediate response time.

Key features in this release for geoscientists are:

• FVCOM loader for netCDF data.
• ROMS, WRF, Telemac loaders available on request.
• Georeferenced image import to help communicate the location of your data (see video).
• Shapefile import to give additional context to the location of your data (see video).
• Vertical transect (curved slices) computation for vertically projecting a 2D plane along a prescribed path (see video).
• New colormaps for creating beautiful plots.
• Load-on-Demand technology for loading huge datasets.

Download Tecplot 360

Tecplot 360 2018 Release 2 is available for download as Free Trial Software, or for customers through the MyTecplot Customer Portal.

About Tecplot, Inc.

Tecplot, an operating company of Toronto-based Constellation Software, Inc. (CSI), is the leading independent developer of visualization and analysis software for engineers and scientists. CSI is a public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX:CSU). CSI acquires, manages and builds software businesses that provide mission-critical solutions in specific vertical markets.

Tecplot visualization and analysis software allows customers using desktop computers and laptops to quickly analyze and understand (local or remote) information hidden in complex data, and communicate their results to others via professional images and animations. The company’s products are used by more than 47,000 technical professionals around the world.

Contact:
Margaret Connelly
Marketing Manager, Tecplot, Inc.
pr@tecplot.com
(425) 653-1200

The post Tecplot 360 2018 R2 Helps Geoscientists Analyze Simulated Data appeared first on Tecplot.

The transcript from the Webinar, Visualizing Ocean Models, has been edited and timestamped. The data from this webinar can’t be shared, but Python scripts are on Github. Scott Fowler is the Webinar host.

Overview of Tecplot, the Company and Products

Tecplot is a data visualization and analysis company. We were founded in 1981 by a couple of Boeing engineers; hence, a fairly large user base in CFD, particularly external aerodynamics. We are known as the largest CFD post-processor provider with approximately 47,000 users worldwide. Our users tell us that we are the most complete post-processor out there, given that we have high quality plotting, 2D, XY, and 3D.

In the past few years, we’ve been focused on the emerging needs of the CFD community. Models are getting larger as CPU power grows. We are working on techniques to help you save time in your analysis and visualization. If you have questions, please email me at scottfowler@tecplot.com.

What are the big problems in post-processing these days?

Well, data are getting larger. With the number of CPUs that are increasing and the speed of the CPUs, your data sizes are growing roughly with Moore’s Law. Discs are not getting any faster. Discs are really becoming the bottleneck to loading your data. Tecplot has some very intelligent disc IO and memory management capabilities to make sure that you can load large datasets—large transient datasets—on a constrained machine.

Just to give you a frame of reference, the machine that I’m demonstrating on today is a Microsoft Surface Book with four CPUs, 16 gigs of RAM. I’m able to load some very large datasets on this machine with Tecplot 360.

Tecplot Offerings

Tecplot 360 is our flagship visualization and analysis tool that I will be talking about and demonstrating today.

Chorus helps you understand ensembles of data. If you are doing a large number of CFD runs for comparison with one another, Chorus may be a good tool for you. We’re not going to demonstrate that today, but know that it’s there if you are doing multiple CFD runs and need to do comparisons. Chorus is included with Tecplot 360 (and TecPLUS maintenance).

TecIO. If you are a code-developer and want to export Tecplot file format from your code, you can use our TecIO library. The TecIO library is completely free. We offer an MPI version if you need to write your data in parallel. We also offer source code if you need to compile it. With so many different versions of MPI available out there, most people do need to compile the source if they’re using the MPI version of the library. We have C++ and Fortran bindings available for that.

Tecplot ADK. Much of the Tecplot user interface is developed using the Tecplot ADK, so you can actually customize the user interface, you can develop custom readers, custom data writers using C++ and Fortran bindings. Feel free to contact us if you’re interested in using that and improving and streamlining your workflows. Contact support@tecplot.com.

PyTecplot. When post-processing, you need to be able to automate. We’ve developed a Python API that we released in early 2017. We’ve only improved it and made it faster in the time since then. We will demonstrate some of our Python API, which we call. Python has really become the glue layer for data science and engineering. We think that this is really an important component moving forward to help automate and allow advanced analysis.

Try Tecplot 360 for Free

Try Tecplot 360 for Free

Visualizing of FVCOM Results Using Tecplot 360

Quick Tour of the Tecplot 360 User Interface

[7:29] — You can follow along by Watching the Webinar (opens new tab).

Here is the general overview of Tecplot 360. Just a quick tour of the user interface, we have the menu system up top, toolbars where you can load and save files. We have our mouse tools for zooming and translating and rotating your data. We have tools here for annotating your plot with text, lines, geometries, et cetera.

On the left side is what we call the plot sidebar. This is where you’re going to change a lot of the attributes, the visual attributes, of your plot.

On the right side, we have a probe sidebar. If you do need to learn more about data within a cell, it’ll show up here. Then what we call a quick macro panel. If there are any repetitive actions that you’re taking, you can record a Tecplot macro or a Tecplot plot script and register it with the quick macro panel so you can just quick double-click to perform the actions that are there.

Work Space

[8:34]

Right here in the middle, we call this big gray area the work space or the work area. Then right in the middle, your initial view is what we call the welcome screen. The welcome screen stores recent Tecplot layouts that you’ve opened. We have links to documentation and online resources.

One of the really great resources here is called the Quick Reference Guide. This is documentation that lets you know about all the keyboard shortcuts and mouse tools and some customization’s that you can do with Tecplot 360. Take a look at the Quick Reference Guide.

Loading FVCOM Data

[9:14]

All right, so let’s go ahead and load our data. I’ll go to the File menu > Load Data, and we’ll go to my desktop where I have my FVCOM dataset. I have a netCDF file here. This came from FVCOM. You can see I have FVCOM selected right here. If you do have results from other solvers or other file formats, we have about 30–35 different formats that we can load here. Like I said, with the Tecplot ADK, you can create your own dataset readers. If you have a custom format, you can extend this list.

We have simple text readers, our general text loader, spreadsheet loader, which can load CSVs as well. If you’re on Windows, we do have an Excel reader. You can load some of your measured data as well for comparison. Today we’re going to focus on FVCOM.

The first thing Tecplot 360 tells me is that the aspect ratio of my data has been adjusted, which you’ll see as you load it. Now this dataset represents a … It’s in a UTM coordinate system and the depth is fairly shallow, so we’ve expanded the Z dimension of my dataset.

Now you’ll see we don’t see anything except this outer bounding box of my data. Tecplot is trying to do as little work as possible when you initially load your dataset. We don’t want to load data that’s unnecessary. We haven’t really loaded anything; we’ve just loaded some of the metadata about your dataset. Let’s take a look at what data we have.

Viewing Data

[10:49]

A good way to get a view of your data is turn on the contour layer. This is going to activate the outer boundaries of my dataset. Let’s just click on the snapped orientation, the X, Y view. That’s going to give me a plan view of my data. I want to see a more interesting contour variable, so I’ll double-click on the contour legend and select, let’s say, temperature.

Georeferenced Image

[11:34]

Now I can see my dataset. I’ll rotate this around. You can see that I do have a full 3D model here. It is a little bit difficult to see where we are in the world here, so let’s bring in a georeferenced image. I can go to Insert > Georeferenced Image. This capability is also available right here on the toolbar. It’ll save you a couple of clicks from having to go up to Insert. We’ll select my georeferenced image.

Tecplot does support BMP, JPEG, and PNG image formats. We also will look for the corresponding world file. A georeferenced image is simply an image file with a paired world file that explains where it should be placed in the scene. These files can be easily created by GIS tools such as ArcGIS or QGIS. You can then bring them into Tecplot. Do note that Tecplot doesn’t do any coordinate transformation here, so make sure that your world files are in the same coordinate system as your data.

Here I can select either the PNG or the world file, and hit open and it’ll bring it in. In this case, I’m really interested in just this lower section of my dataset, which is why I have a smaller image here. This georeferenced image is actually a 3D object, so it’ll rotate around with the scene. That makes it quite nice if you do want to rotate around.

Animate Through Time

[12:56]

Let’s go ahead and animate through time.

We can see that the image is initially placed at zero and is drawn on top of the data as the tides go in and out. We’ll just double-click on our image and let’s bring this down to -15. We can animate through again. Now our data is going to be shown above the georeferenced image the entire time. A nice, easy way to bring in the georeferenced images.

Examine the Loaded Data

[13:32]

Let me give you an explanation quickly of actually what the data looks like that we’ve loaded in. One of the most important dialogues in Tecplot is the dataset information dialogue. This will give you some info about what we’ve actually loaded.

Here we have what are called zones. Each zone is effectively a block of your data. In this case, each zone represents one time-step. You can see that it’s a finite element brick. Each zone has a solution time associated with it and a strand number. The strand number simply says that all of these zones are the same object through time.

You can see that this total dataset is fairly small, about 3.3 million total elements through all of the time steps. We have X, Y, lat, long, our spatial variables here. We have some vector components. You can see we have our salinity and temperature. You can see some interesting information about these as well.

Loading Large Datasets

[14:37]

Like I said, Tecplot does a very good job of memory management. One of the things that Tecplot will do is it won’t load data until it’s demanded by the plot. In this case, we’re showing X, Y, Z variables and we’re showing temperature. As we go through this list, we can see that the variables that are not required are not loaded, such as latitude has not been loaded, initial density not loaded.

This is a way of Tecplot saving memory as you’re loading your data. You really don’t have to be concerned about loading very large datasets. I have a 250 gig dataset of Boston Bay simulation out in Boston, and I’m able to load it on my machine because of that memory management.

That’s zones and variables.

Frames

[15:28]

What we have here is this is what we call a frame. You can have multiple frames in Tecplot to show different views of your data. We’ll get more into that later. Each frame can have a name. You can manage your frames down here on the frame sidebar.

Contouring and Colormaps

[15:49]

Let’s look at contouring. Contouring is a pretty important part of your creating presentation quality plots, and choosing the right colormap is quite important. Here we’ve chosen temperature and we’re showing the viridis colormap. This is a perceptually linear colormap. It’s good for people who are color blind and gives a nice, even view of your data. It has a fairly linear increase of luminosity across the scale. These sequential colormaps are really important.

Now we’ll double-click on the legend. A better colormap for temperature is actually one developed by Kristen Thyng. She’s developed the cmocean colormaps, and she’s been nice enough to release those in open source. We’ve been able to bring those into Tecplot. Let’s choose the cmocean thermal colormap, which is a nice one for temperature. We’ll do a continuous contouring so you can see the difference between continuous and banded. This can give a really nice, blended view.

Now let’s say I also want to look at salinity. I’ll set up what we call contour groups. I’ll set up another contour group and I’ll have this one 0.2 salinity. We’ll choose again one of the cmocean colormaps. We’ll choose Haline, which is very similar to the viridis, but it has some slightly softer tones. We’ll also make this a continuous colormap.

Now if I want to switch between temperature and salinity, I can simply right-click, select my contour item on the toolbar, and I’ll select salinity. Now we’re looking at the salinity of our dataset. Again, I can advance through time here.

Isosurfaces

[17:38]

At this point, we’re only looking at the upper surface of our data. Now what happens if we want to see a lower level of our data? Well, a good way to do that is with isosurfaces. Let’s go ahead and set up an isosurface. I can go isosurface details.

Now a quick note here is we have what we call zone layers. These are going to be the attributes of the actual physical data that you’ve imported. Then we have derived objects. These are going to be objects that are going to cut through your data, your model data, an isosurface being a derived object.

We want to use an isosurfaces at siglev (siglev defines the sigma levels in the dataset). This dataset has values ranging from -1 to zero. -1 is going to be the bottom or the bathymetry. Zero is going to be the surface. Let’s take a look at the bathymetry. We’ll go ahead and show this.

Now we can’t quite see it yet because it’s being obscured by my zone data. Let’s go ahead and turn off the contour and shade of my zone and my images getting in the way. Let’s go ahead and move this all the way down to the bottom. We still have it, and now we can see this is being colored by temperature. Let’s look at the salinity on this as well.

This is the bottom or the bathymetry of my data. We can go ahead and look at the XY plan view again. A nice way to look at what’s going on through the depth of my data is just to animate that isosurface. Let’s go from -1 to zero. I need to type in zero here. We’ll do 50 steps and then I can simply animate.

You can see how my salinity is changing as I go through the depth. Now if we were to look at the side view, we can see how this is going and changing through the layers. This is my isosurface at this particular time step. If I want to see how that isosurface is changing at another time step, I can simply change my time step and then animate through again.

Slices

[20:23]

Another way to look at what’s going on in your dataset is to use slices. We can use our slice tool here. I can simply point and click where I want that slice. Just put in a constant X. Let’s say I want to also look at salinity. Again, I can simply right-click and select the salinity contour group.

Let’s say I want to go through the Strait of Juan de Fuca here. Let’s change this to a Y slice. With the slice tool active, I can simply press the Y key on the keyboard and that will change to the Y dimension. If I want another slice, I can add a slice group, too. Let’s go back to X, and we’ll show this. Again, we’ll right-click and change that to salinity. Now I have a couple of slices in here.

Creating Transects with Python

[21:27]

Well, the coastlines are never straight. Really, what we want to do here is we want to do a curved slice or a transect. Tecplot doesn’t have that capability built in, so this is where the Python language comes in. Let’s go ahead and we’ll turn off the slice and the isosurface, and we’ll come back to my full volume dataset. Let’s go back into the X, Y plan view.

Let’s take a look at a curved slice that goes down through the Puget Sound here. We’ve developed a Python script to use a couple of tools in Tecplot 360 to help out with this. We’ll use the geometry tool. We’ll start here at the opening of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and we’ll just try to go mid-channel down through Puget Sound here.

I can just click, and I can adjust these points at the end if I don’t quite get through mid-channel. We’ll come down in here to … I believe that’s Tacoma, Washington down there. We’ll zoom in and let’s just adjust a couple of these points. I have the adjuster tool here. I’ll just move this guy a little, maybe move this one around. Let’s move this one down just a little bit.

Now I’m happy with where this path is. I’ll just do a Ctrl + F to do a view fit. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to extract these points to a new Tecplot zone. Let’s go into the dataset information dialogue and show you what we’ve done here.

By doing that extract, I now have a new zone that we’ve created. It’s I-ordered, so that means it’s just an array of data. A Python script that I’m going to execute is going to use the XY locations to define the path of the transect.

One of the important things with a script is to ensure that you’ve captured your grid correctly. Let’s just take a look at the grid. I’m going to turn on the scatter layer and we’ll take a look at how many points we have along that line. Let’s turn off scatter for my main zone and we’ll just look at scatter for my extracted points.

You can see each one of these points or this zone, the XY locations, are capturing the grid correctly. We have pretty good density here. We’re not jumping over cells. In a couple of places, we have a couple of points within a cell, and that’s fine. OK, that geometry that I created, I’m done with, so we can go ahead and delete that. Now I’m going to execute my Python script.

We have a scripting menu here. There are a number of ways that you can interact with Tecplot with scripts. We have the Tecplot macro language, which is a language that we developed probably 20 or 25 years ago, but we’ve recently introduced Python. Python is much more powerful. It gives you the ability to deal with arrays and string manipulation and actually allows you to extract data out of Tecplot and deal with it.

In order for our Python scripts to run outside of Tecplot and communicate with Tecplot, we need to allow PyTecplot connections. Our Python language actually communicates over sockets. Then I’ll come here to a command prompt and I’ll just execute my vertical transect script.

What this is going to do, first it’s going to connect with Tecplot 360. Then for each time step, it’s going to create a new set of points which represents my transect. Then it’s interpolating all the variable values from the volume dataset onto that new point. Then it’s going to round out by actually creating a plot of the new transect zone.

There you go. It took about 22 seconds to do that. Again, we have about three million total points in this dataset, 24 time steps. Here we have our transect showing salinity along that path.

These two frames are now linked together. If I animate one, both of them animate. We can see both of these animated. It’s a little hard to see the animation in this upper plot. Let’s turn off the mesh. Let me show you what that transect actually looks like up in this upper mesh.

We’ll, again, go into the zone style dialogue. This created a new zone, actually a new set of zones, one zone per time step that are called transect. We’ll turn that on and we’ll turn off our extracted points. For this, the transect is inside. How do we see inside there?

Well, let’s turn off the contour layer and we’ll turn on translucency. Let’s make it 70% translucent. Now I can see the path of that transect. It chose our first contour group as the coloring. In the zone style dialogue, we can say, well, we want this to be colored by salinity. Let’s also turn off the mesh. Now we can see what that transect looks like in our dataset. Again, animate through time.

Time Average

[27:31]

One of the other things that people have asked us for is once they’ve computed a transect, how do you compute a time average? Again, this is something that is not directly built into Tecplot 360, but Tecplot 360 does have the capability through the running of equations. I’m going to run another Python script here to compute the time average.

What this script does is it asks for which strand do you want to average. Remember we looked at the dataset information dialogue earlier and we pointed out the strand index. We want to do the time average of my transect. Let’s go into the dataset information dialogue and find out what strand number that is. All of our transect zones have the same strand number. That’s strand number two. We’ll come back into the command prompt and we’ll just type two.

Now what this is going to do is it’s going to create one new zone and compute the average of all of the other zones. You can see, for instance, temperature and distance used to the Tecplot equation syntax, which we’ll go into in a minute, and did the summation of all of my transect zones divided by 24. We now have a new zone called Time Average, which has the same grid topology as the transect zones. You see Imax of 200, the Jmax of 11. This is the same grid topology. Now all of the variable values here represent the average of the transects.

Now we want to view that data. We like this view, so let’s just copy this frame. I’m doing a Ctrl + C and then Ctrl + V. Then we’ll move our copied frame up. Here I want to have this be my time average. Let’s make sure to put an annotation so we know what we’re looking at, Time Average. Down here we’re going to be looking at the transect at a particular solution time. Tecplot has what we call dynamic text. This is a keyword that will show us the time step.

Now let’s go ahead and animate through here. You see that this is not our time average yet, so we’ll go into Select this Frame, go into Zone Style, and we’ll select Time Average. We want this to be colored by salinity. Now we have a transient frame and a time average frame. We can, again, animate through time. You can see that this is now static and representing my time average.

Velocity Magnitude

[30:40]

What happens if we want to look at another quantity that we don’t actually have in the dataset? For instance, I have my vector components U, V, and W, but what I really want to do is I want to look at the velocity magnitude. Well, we can do that quite easily in Tecplot. One way to do it is through the Analyze menu > Calculate Variables. This has a large number of formulas that you can execute, one being velocity magnitude, so quite easy through here. But let me calculate velocity magnitude by hand to give you a description of the equation syntax.

We go into Data Alter > Specify Equations. One of the key things to know here is the use of curly braces. Curly braces are going to represent variable names. We’re going to do the square root of the U variable squared plus V squared plus WW squared. That’s all there is to it to compute a new variable, curly braces being the big thing you need to know here.

We have a lot of built-in functions, square roots, cosines, et cetera. Those are all available in the Help menu. Here we can just hit Compute. Now I’ve computed velocity magnitude for each zone. Now let’s contour by that.

I’ll just double-click on the contour legend. That’s a nice, quick way to come up to the contour dialogue. We’ll select Velocity Magnitude. We’ll do the same thing down here. Now I can go ahead and animate that through time and see how my velocity magnitude is changing through my dataset over time. We’ve talked about annotations; we’ve talked about calculating new variables.

Exporting Images and Movies

[32:52]

Now let’s talk about how to actually get the data out to your colleagues and so they can see your results.

Tecplot does have a number of ways of exporting images. We have, through the export dialog, we can export static images such as PNG, JPEG. We also have vector formats like EPS postscript, WMF. If you’re publishing to a paper, those are some very nice formats to use. But in this case, we have transient data, so we want to create a movie.

Let’s reorganize our frames here a bit to take advantage of our 3D data as well. I’ll bring this frame over and down. Let’s go back to this XY plan view and we’ll hide the contour legend, hide this guy. We can zoom in on our data. Let’s make sure that we’re showing our transect. Let’s say we like this view. Now we want to export this to a movie format, which we can do here through the details dialogue.

Time animation details. We want to export to a movie, so we’ll just click on this filmstrip icon. Let’s go to an MP4. A critical thing here is that we need to select the proper region. The current frame will export just this one frame with the bold border around it, but we want to export all the frames.

We’ll specify a width. Let’s go 1024. Let’s specify an anti-aliasing of three. Anti-aliasing is nice. It makes your text look nice and smooth on output. Let’s specify our animation speed. We only have 24 frames here, so let’s go six frames per second. We’ll end up with about a four-second video. We’ll hit OK, and let’s put this right in our folder here, just call it movie. We’ll hit Save. This will take just a minute to render. Then we’ll take a look at what that movie looks like.

At each one of these times steps, it’s loading the data, it’s rendering to an image. Then, finally, it compiles all those images into an MP4 file. It looks like it’s done. We’ll just double-click on the movie here. There’s our output. Really nice way to create images for sharing and movies to share with your colleagues. That’s what we had for the live demo. Let’s jump back into the PowerPoint presentation.

Summary

[36:17]

Let’s summarize what we saw today. We saw really a nice way to load your data and interact with your data without having to write too many scripts. Now we did show the use of some Python, which may be required for doing advanced analysis, for doing really advanced movie creation, but for the most part, Tecplot 360 really allows a way to load your data and interact with it, make all those fine-tune adjustments for your final plots in an interactive manner rather than having to rerun scripts to get text in the right location or a contour legend with the right values on it. You can automate your analysis with PyTecplot.

How to Purchase

One of the great things about buying Tecplot 360 is you get access to our technical support staff. We have a great staff here that can help you write some of these scripts. Rather than you having to go into Google and try to find out how to write a script to create a curved transect, you can just call up our tech support staff and they can help you out. Learn more and contact Tecplot Technical Support.

Request a Quote for Tecplot 360

You can load really large datasets. Like I said before, Tecplot 360 has been developed with large datasets in mind. We’ve added parallelism to the product so it’ll take advantage of all your CPUs when you’re doing things like creating slices or isosurfaces or calculating new variables.

You can get recognized. Your papers are going to look great with the high quality raster and vector export formats that we have. I know that a lot of people doing ocean research are in academia and you use LaTeX quite a bit. We do actually have support for LaTeX fonts within Tecplot 360. Many universities already have Tecplot 360. If you don’t know if you have 360, access to it, you can always contact us to see if you already have access.

Now what you saw today, we’ve sent out to a number of people already to do some beta testing for us, and these are some of my favorite quotes from people that we’ve worked with. I really love the one. Blake came from a pure scripting background, and he said that he was really able to accelerate his work and get his work done faster using the point and click interface. Being able to record Python scripts directly from the Tecplot 360 user interface gave him a great head start in using our Python API as well.

“This is way better than what I was using before. It’s really easy to navigate.”
—Blake Clark, Graduate Research Assistant, 
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

Then just as a kudos to our tech support guys, this is another of my favorite quotes. It shows that we do really have a great tech support staff and we’re always eager to help you guys out.

“I’ve been in the IT business for 25 years, and you provided the best support of any vendor I’ve worked with to date.”
– IT Administrator, College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences, Western New England University

The post Visualizing Ocean Models Webinar Transcript appeared first on Tecplot.

This blog answers 9 questions about visualizing ocean models with Tecplot 360. Asked in our Visualizing Ocean Models webinar, they are answered by Scott Fowler, Tecplot Product Manager, and Wen Long, Technical Product Manager.

Watch the Webinar »

Questions from the webinar “Visualizing Ocean Models”

Watch the Webinar

1. Where can I get the Python scripts from this Webinar?

Python scripts from this webinar are now on GitHub.

2. How do I convert shapefiles to Tecplot PLT format?

Watch this short video tutorial on Converting Shapefiles to PLT Using PyTecplot.

3. Does Tecplot have loaders for other ocean and weather models, for example, ROMS, WRF and TELEMAC?

Tecplot ROMS, WRF and Telemac loaders are still in beta. To try these loaders out, contact support@tecplot.com.

If you are working with other models, many export netCDF format. NetCDF is a very flexible format, which makes it difficult to support in a generic way. As we develop capabilities for the geoscience community, we will prioritize based on interest and requests. We found that FVCOM had the largest set of support base so far.

If you are using codes like ADCIRC, ROMS, TELEMAC, please let us know and we’ll make sure to put that into our priorities.

But we do have the TecIO Library, we do have PyTecplot, and you can even use MATLAB to convert data to Tecplot format.

4. Can Tecplot plot differences between two different outputs for the same area as contours?

If you have two different datasets, the Tecplot equation syntax allows you to compute differences between datasets. We can certainly help you out with that and show you how to do that. Watch these videos on comparing grids from two different outputs.

5. Do you have a complete user’s manual?

Yes, of course. Tecplot has been in development for nearly 30 years now, so we do have an extensive user’s manual. We also have very good documentation for the Python APIs, so full user’s manual and, again, full access to our technical support staff. Get the Documentation.

6. Which FVCOM version does Tecplot work with?

Tecplot supports FVCOM version 2.7.1 to the most current FVCOM 3.2. I believe most of the versions are supported as long as you have the netCDF output from them.

7. In addition to existing frames from FVCOM netCDF file, how can I add another frame showing a wind vector which changes by time?

Tecplot has a multi-frame layout. Whether your data is coming from the same dataset or a different dataset, you can simply create another frame, attach your dataset to it and show wind vectors.

You can load multiple datasets into Tecplot 360 simultaneously and link those frames in time. If they have the same time steps, it’s no problem.

8. Can Tecplot be run on an HPC through client server mode?

Try Tecplot 360 for Free »

The answer is no. We can’t run on an HPC, but you do have to be logged into the head node. Tecplot 360 is not a multi-node, parallel application. We found that we haven’t needed it because Tecplot’s memory and data I/O management is so efficient. Our customers have not had a need to run Tecplot in a distributed mode.

I encourage you to try Tecplot 360. If you do have issues with the size of your dataset, let us know and we’ll work with you to come up with a solution.

If you do have your data on the remote server and you are running Tecplot 360 on your desktop, you can actually access the data remotely.

Try Tecplot 360 for Free

9. Is there an easy way to show two vector datasets, for example, surface velocity and mid-depth velocity?

Tecplot can plot only vectors of one set of vector components at a time in a single frame. If you have just one set of vector components, you could plot an isosurface at the surface and another isosurface at mid-depth. Then those would overlap and you could see those simultaneously.

If you have two different sets of vector variables, there is a way to do it using two overlaid Tecplot frames, with one frame being translucent. If you want to see of that, we can certainly work with you on that (again, contact technical support).

Request a Quote

We have favorable pricing for qualified academics in the US and Canada – Request an Academic Quote.

For the commercial and government sectors – Request a Quote.

Try Tecplot 360 for Free

Your trial starts from the first time that you start Tecplot 360. So, if you download it and get distracted, not to worry. The five-day trial will start after you install and start running the trial.

During those five days, you have access to our technical support team. We can help you load your data and create and manipulate plots, even help develop some Python scripts for advanced analysis.

Please take advantage of the free trial and compare it to your existing workflow. I think you’ll be really excited and happy.

The post 9 Questions About Visualizing Ocean Models appeared first on Tecplot.

Description

In this video we will demonstrate how to compute the mass flow rate through the exhaust port of an internal combustion engine using a CONVERGE dataset. To do this we will need to place and extract a slice in the exhaust port.

Place a Slice in the Exhaust Port

First, right-click and hide the Piston zone so that we can see the bottom of the valve. Then toggle on Slices, and change the Slice location to Arbitrary. Using the 3-Point Probe tool, define the initial orientation of the Arbitrary Slice, and use the Slice Placement tool to adjust it as needed. Toggle on Translucency so that we can see the interior more clearly. The orientation and location of the slice will have an effect on the integration result.

To isolate a single exhaust port, we will use Value Blanking under Plot > Blanking > Value Blanking. In this example we will blank any values where X>= 0, and Y<=0.

Extract a Slice Over All Time Steps

To extract the slice over all time steps in our dataset, select Data > Extract > Extract Slices Over Time. This will prompt Tecplot 360 to automatically step through each time step, and extract the slice to a new zone at each time step. Slice extraction requires loading of data at each time step, and so the speed of this operation will depend on the size of your data, number of time steps, and the speed of your disk access.

Learn about Tecplot for CONVERGE »

After the slice has been extracted to new zones, we are ready to calculate the mass flow rate.

Calculate Mass Flow Rate

First, under Analyze > Fluid Properties, we need to specify the gas constant for air at 287 Joules per kilogram Kelvin. Then we need to define our convective and state variables under Analyze > Field Variables.

Note: Tecplot 360 is units-agnostic. Ensure consistent units with your simulation data.

Then, select Analyze > Perform Integration to perform the calculation. Change the Type of Integration to Mass Flow Rate, and the Domain of Integration to Integrate by Time Strands for the last time strand in our dataset, which is for the recently extracted slices.

To generate a line plot for the results, toggle on Plot Results As.

This concludes the tutorial on calculating the mass flow rate. Thank you for watching.

Learn about Tecplot for CONVERGE »

Try Tecplot 360 for Free

The post Calculating Mass Flow Rate appeared first on Tecplot.

ATS Uses Tecplot 360 visualization and analysis to optimize race car lap times

Stock Car Brazil is a top racing series in South America. All competitors heavily modify Chevrolet Cruze sedans to race at speeds up to 350 km/h or 220 mph. With nearly identical cars, hundredths of a second can mean the difference between victory and defeat. As with NASCAR and Formula 1 racing, the use of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) to improve performance of these race cars is a key advantage for top teams.

Read the full case study »

A new case study by Brazilian Tecplot distributor ATS describes their “meticulous analysis” of the aerodynamics of the entire car, including the tradeoffs between top speed, downforce for cornering performance and braking – key components to lower lap times. Collaborating with a company like ATS and visualizing results with Tecplot brings benefits that put some racers ahead of their rivals on the track.

Read the full case study »

About ATS

ATS is the Tecplot distributor for Brazil. They provide consulting engineering services as well as represent a full line of simulation software solutions. They have offices in Miami, Florida, USA and Sao Paolo, Brazil. Contact information for both offices can be found on their website.

About Tecplot, Inc.

Tecplot, Inc is an operating company of Toronto-based Constellation Software, Inc. (CSI), is the leading independent developer of visualization and analysis software for engineers and scientists. CSI is a public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX:CSU). CSI acquires, manages and builds software businesses that provide mission-critical solutions in specific vertical markets.

Tecplot visualization and analysis software allows customers using desktop computers and laptops to quickly analyze and understand (local or remote) information hidden in complex data, and communicate their results to others via professional images and animations. The company’s products are used by more than 47,000 technical professionals around the world.

The post Improving Stock Car Performance with CFD Analysis appeared first on Tecplot.

Description

Scott Imlay: We will be talking about our SZL Server for fast and secure remote data visualization. This is our client server implementation. My name is Scott Imlay. I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Tecplot.

The expert today is Dr. Dave Taflin. He is a Senior Software Developer, and did most of the development for the SZL Server. So he is the guy in the know and will be answering our questions today.

What is SZL Server?

[0:37]

Dave Taflin: As you mentioned, SZL Server is our client server architecture for loading data that resides on remote machines. It consists of two components, first off an add-on, and the main dialog to the add-on is shown on the right side of the screen there. And secondly, a remote server that this add-on talks to, to retrieve data from the remote machine.

Now, I should clarify, a server may be a little bit of a misnomer here. Most people think of servers as programs that are running all the time, listening for inbound connections, like a web server. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Our server is launched for a specific data load, and it exits when the data that it has loaded is no longer needed, such as when you select new layout in Tecplot 360. The remote server may be launched directly by the client, or it may be manually launched by the user, and we’ll go over both of those scenarios during this presentation.

The server, once it’s running, loads data as directed by the client and passes just the subzones that are required to the client on demand for whatever the current data requirements are for the current plot.

And I should specify here that the SZL Server requires our new SZL file format, which has been under development here at Tecplot for the last three years or so. It enables Tecplot 360 to load small subsets of your data, thereby greatly reducing the disc access for the plots that you need to make. Finally, for security we use the SSH encryption and authentication methods.

Scott Imlay: If you are not familiar with SZL, and I know not everyone is, we actually have done some webinars on this that you can refer back to, as well as blogs. So there’s plenty of resources on our website.

Learn more about SZL

Running SZL Server

[3:06]

Dave Taflin: Now I’m going to give a brief demo of one mode of operation for our client server.

First off, under the file menu, you select load remote data. That displays the dialog that you saw on the slide a minute ago. You have three different connections options here. We’re going to pick the default one, SSH tunneling. This, in addition to using SSH authentication, will also encrypt your data for security. My remote machine is named TPB045, and my login ID on that machine is Dave.

I have options here to use an SSH key or SSH-agent. We’re not going to do either of those right now because those require some setup. If you don’t have any setup at all and you’ve just been using your password, the SSH to the remote machine, that’s fine. Just click, “Do not use SSH key,” and go ahead and connect, and you’ll be prompted for your password.

As soon as I click okay here, I’ll authenticate to the remote SSH server, and the SZL server will be launched on the remote machine and connect back to the client here. And then I’ll have a couple more controls I can use as soon as that connection is established back.

The select files button is enabled now. This is allowing me to browse for files on the remote machine. It turns out that since I’ve practiced this, the file that I want to load is already preloaded, and that’s keyed off the remote machine name. So I’m going to go ahead and just click okay here, to load crutcher.szplt.

Now, a question I’ll address later in a little more detail is macros and layouts, but generally speaking these are supported, so I’m going to go ahead and save a layout and then reload it to show you what that looks like. I’ll just name it Untitled and save it, and then go new layout. Now, as I mentioned a minute ago, since I went new layout, the remote server has just exited. But I can load that layout that I just saved. I’ll be prompted for my password again.

And now SZL Server is being relaunched on machine TBP045. As soon as it launches, it connects back and the load data command is issued, and we get the same layout that we had before. So that is our first demo. Let’s move on to some more questions.

How is SZL Server different from remote display?

[5:55]

Dave Taflin: What we usually mean with remote display, is that you’re running Tecplot 360 on the remote machine over in the supercomputer center or whatever, and using the magic of the X-Window system, you’re piping the GUI and all of the graphics in the X-Window form to your local machine.

We’ve seen a lot of performance issues with this, and they’re prevalent because there’s a lot of chatter. The X11 protocol has a lot of chatter. So when you get higher network latencies, the performance degrades significantly, so we’ve seen a lot of performance problems.

Also, of course, in order to run in that way, you have to have Tecplot 360 installed on the remote machine. And although that generally is the case on the larger supercomputer sites, I wouldn’t assume that it’s installed everywhere just yet. We would be happy if it were, however. But the nice thing about SZL Server is that it gives you an option to remotely view your data without having Tecplot 360 installed on the remote machine.

Scott Imlay: And even if it is installed on the remote machine, you often have little control over which version is installed remotely. You may be a couple, three versions behind, which may or may not be a problem, but it’s another issue.

What is needed for the remote server?

[7:24]

Dave Taflin: We currently support running the SZL Server only on Linux machines, so the remote computer has to have Linux installed. Since we’re reliant on SZL technology to limit the amount of data required, you don’t need very much computer power. The remote machine, of course, does need direct access to your data files. But since the SZL Server does not require a Tecplot license, you don’t need to worry about any licensing on the remote machine (only on your local machine). And furthermore, you can install SZL Server under your own account, so you don’t need any administrative permissions.

And then finally, of course, you have to be able to access the remote machine, which you will normally do through SSH, and that is the mechanism that SZL Server itself uses. You can get around that using the manual connection method that we’ll talk about a little more later, but generally speaking, SSH seems to be the standard, and that is the technology that we use by default with SZL Server.

What if my data is not in SZL format (*.szplt)?

[8:36]

Dave Taflin: Well, you have a couple of options. You can use Tecplot 360 as a data converter. Now, this does require that Tecplot 360 be installed on the same machine or a visible machine on the same side of the connection where your data files reside. But to use Tecplot 360 as a data converter, you don’t need a license. So you can, again, just install it under your own account, not worry about any licensing, and then run Tecplot 360 with the -convert flag to convert any data files that Tecplot 360 can load into SZPLT files.

This may be as easy as just a single command line command, but there are some supported data file formats that you can’t load directly from the command line, or you may have non-standard file extensions on your data files. And in those cases, you can create a macro that reads the file and exports it an SZPLT file. You can then run that in batch mode to get the same effect.

The second option, and it’s one that we encourage for those of you who are writing your own simulation codes, is to support writing SZPLT files directly from your application. And you can do this pretty easily using the TecIO library that’s freely available from our website.

Learn more about TecIO

Scott Imlay: And just a little more encouragement for TecIO. The SZL files have some other advantages. They load much faster into Tecplot 360, especially for finite-element data. They’re smaller, especially for finite-element data, and they use less memory. So there’s several advantages in addition to being compatible with the SZL Server.

How fast is SZL Server?

[10:35]

Dave Taflin: Well, in true consultant mode, I should say, “That depends.” Of course it does. It’s impossible to get around certain things that it depends on, particularly the network speed and latency of the network that you’re connecting over.

But generally speaking, for actual remote data, not just something that’s on a different machine on your LAN, but something that’s out on a supercomputer center or up in the Amazon Cloud or something like that, it’s much faster.

A complex plot will take about five times as long to display as if you were loading it from your local hard disk. But that is still an order of magnitude (or two) faster than downloading the file to your local hard disk. So it can save you a lot of time.

Does SZL Server support all data types and zone types?

[11:27]

Dave Taflin: SZL Server supports everything that Tecplot 360 supports, except polyhedral zones. We are working on extending our SZL technology to polyhedral zones. That remains a work in progress.

Are layout files and macros supported by SZL Server?

[11:50]

Dave Taflin: Yes. As I demonstrated a minute ago, if you’ve loaded data via client server, you can save layouts or you can be recording a macro while you’re doing that. And when you play those back, you’ll be prompted for any authentication information that’s required by the SSH server.

There is one caveat to that. On Windows, if you try to run in batch mode and user input is required, like a password or something, that’s going to fail because of the difficulty of maintaining a connection between Tecplot 360 and any kind of a console. Windows likes to launch things and separate them from their terminal window, whereas on Linux or Mac that connection is maintained. So with that caveat, yes, macros and layouts are supported by client server.

And as a side note, remember that layouts and macros are both something that happen on the client side. You sitting in front of your Macintosh or Windows machine or whatever, you’re going to be using Tecplot 360 to run the macro or to load the layout. And from there, all the client server magic happens behind the scenes to load the data from the remote machine.

And you can share layouts and macros as long as the remote machine is still visible, and whatever user that’s running your macros has whatever credentials are required to log in to your account on the remote machine.

Scott Imlay: Layouts and macros are both ASCII files, so you can just email them to people if you want to – they are easy to share.

What if I perform an action that requires me to save my data when I save the layout?

[13:46]

Dave Taflin: This is something like slice extraction, and if you’re an experienced Tecplot 360 user you’ll probably already be familiar with which operations you perform that will require you to save a new data file when you save a layout. It’s a shrinking list, but there are still a few operations that cannot be journaled. Therefore, if you want to save a layout, you’ll have to save a new data file as well. If you go ahead and save a layout in that situation, then your entire data file is going to be downloaded to your local machine.

Probably this is going to be really slow because the sweet spot for client server here is large remote data files. You’ll know that this is happening because you’ll see the dialog at the bottom of the screen here. My recommendation would just be for you to click no and not save the layout. You can still save a macro that performs the same data alterations that brought this situation upon you, but I would not save a new data file. That’s likely to be a very slow operation.

Can I load both local and remote data in a single Tecplot 360 session?

[15:16]

Dave Taflin: Yes, you can! You can do this in a couple of ways.

You can use different frames for each of your individual data loads, just like you’ve always been able to with Tecplot 360.

You can also, if you’ve already loaded remote data into a frame, you can also append data with any loader that supports data appending. The SZL client currently doesn’t support appending, so you can’t append one remote data load to an existing data set yet. That’s in our suggested feature list.

I think the most common scenario is that you’ll want to be comparing two different data sets, possibly from different servers, and you can load those into different frames side by side for comparison.

How secure is SZL Server?

[16:16]

Dave Taflin: It is as secure as SSH itself is, which uses pretty state-of-the-art authentication and encryption methods. As I mentioned before, it uses SSH tunneling to encrypt your data for transmission. We also support multi-factor authentication to the remote SSH server. This is typically how security is enforced for the large supercomputer centers.

Can SZL Server support multi-hop SSH?

[16:49]

Dave Taflin: As I just mentioned, supercomputer centers will commonly have multi-factor authentication. You’ll be, at that point, logged in into what they may call a bastion server, which is kind of the front-end access. It’s like the front door to the supercomputer center. You have to go through that in order to subsequently access the machine that you’re actually interested in accessing. So you SSH to the bastion server, and then from there you can SSH to whatever machine you really want.

And yes, we do support that with the manual connection method, and that’s going to be our second demonstration.

Manual Connection Method Demo

[17:36]

More information is also available in the Manual Connection Mode section of the Tecplot 360 User Manual.

I’ve pulled up an extern window on a Linux machine we have here. I could do this from Windows using PuTTY and PuTTY’s SSH-agent, but it’s a little easier to see what’s going on with the Linux command lines, so I’m going to do this all on Linux.

First off, I’m going to launch the SSH-agent. This allows me to forward some credentials to both of the remote machines I’m going to be accessing. So I’m going to go ahead and launch SSH-agent the usual way. If you use SSH-agent, you’re probably familiar with that syntax. Then I’ll just add my default encryption key to the agent. Now it’s available for forwarding.

The next thing I’m going to do is log into the bastion server, and I’m going to be using remote port forwarding to provide the tunnel for our data to come back to us. So that’s going to look like this. I’ll use the -A command to use the SSH-agent for part of my authentication. There will be more required in a minute, as you’ll see. And -R for a reverse port forward. And then I’m going to pick a port on the remote machine that I know it is available.

You’re supposed to be able to enter 0 and let the SSH server pick a remote port for you. I think there’s a bug in several versions of OpenSSH, including the one that I’m using here, that actually prevents that from working. So you unfortunately have to know an open port number on the remote machine. I’ve had good luck so far with 45678, so let’s see if that keeps working.

And then that’s going to be forwarded to the local host, and I forgot a step, so let me back up and launch Tecplot 360 first, because I need to know what the local port number is. Okay, so I’m going to launch 360 and initiate a remote data load, and I’m going to use the manual connection here and just click connect. So this -P here, that tells me what my local port number is that the SZL client is listening on.

Now I can go ahead and do my SSH to the bastion server first. So that’s going to be SSH -A -R. The remote port is 45678, and that’s going to be forwarded to my local host here, and port 48689. That’ll be different every time you initiate a remote data load.

And then, of course, I have to enter where I’m going and who I am. This is up in Amazon’s Cloud, so it’s going to be ec2-user@ … and this is the IP address of my remote machine that I’ve set up as the bastion server.

And since we have multi-factor authentication going here, I’m using a Google authenticator, so I’ll just enter the six-digit code that’s currently up. And now I’m logged into my bastion server.

Now I turn around and do the same thing again to access the data server that I’m interested in, so that’s going to be another SSH with another reverse port forward. I’m using SSH-agent again to forward my SSH key to the data server.

And then I’m going to use 45678 on the second machine as well, so that’s going to look like this. That will forward port 45678 on the remote machine to my bastion server’s port 45678, which will turn around and forward it back to the machine on which Tecplot 360 is running. And again, I’m ec2-user, and the data server’s IP address is 52.35.147.24.

Because we are using port forwarding, you will need to modify the Manual Connection Mode instruction in the Tecplot 360 User Manual.

Launching SZL Server

[22:27]

First note, I do have SZL Server installed, and I’ve added it to my path, which is required. So I can just type szlserver, and instead of the IP address of my local machine here at Tecplot, I’ll just use localhost, and for the port, I’ll use the port that I forwarded from the remote data server. But I still do need this authentication key, and this likewise, it’s going to be different every time you do a remote data load.

As soon as I launch this, it should connect through all of the port forwarding, all the way back to my local machine here, to the SZL client that’s waiting for it, and indeed it did.

You can see, I’ve also got crutcher.szplt on this remote machine, so I’ll go ahead and load that.

Now I have an oddity with the X11 server that’s running on my Windows machine. It throws some kind of strange event that trips Tecplot 360 up momentarily, but all I have to do is select that 3D plot, and here are again with our Crutcher data. Okay, so that is the demonstration of multi-hop SSH using reverse port forwarding to support multi-hop SSH, using the manual connection method.

As soon as I launch this, it should connect through all of the port forwarding, all the way back to my local machine here, to the SZL client that’s waiting for it, and indeed it did.

Scott Imlay: If you are familiar with how this works, and you have recommendations on making it easier, because that could take a little bit of time, we’d love to hear your recommendations. We’ll have an email at the end of this presentation, you can send any suggestions or questions to.

Send questions or suggestions to Tecplot Support.

How do you get SZL Server?

[24:26]

Dave Taflin: The Linux installer for SZL Server is shipped and installed with every version of Tecplot 360. It’s stored in the SZL Server folder, which is just beneath the Tecplot 360 install directory. You’ll need to transfer it to your remote machine, probably using SZP, and then run it on the remote machine. You then have to add SZL Server’s bin folder to your PATH environment variable. You’ll do that by modifying .bashrc and .bash_profile to modify your PATH environment variable. Having done that, you’re pretty much done because there’s no licensing required on the remote machine.

Can SZL Server work in parallel?

[25:15]

Dave Taflin: Each instance of SZL Server will use multi-threading, but it is not running in MPI parallel, if that was the intent of the question. However, each remote load that you do is going to launch a different instance of SZL Server, so you can get some parallelism there.

Dave Taflin: If you are familiar with Amazon ec2, I typically use one of the smallest available machines as a server, which has only a fraction of a gigabyte of memory. And I’ve been able to load most of our example data files, which can run into at least the hundreds of megabytes. Because, as Scott said, with the end of the two-thirds scaling for dropping a slice, you wind up not loading all that much data.

Thank you for watching the Webinar!

Scott Imlay: Thank you all for joining us today. We recorded this webinar, and we’ll have it available for you on our website. And you can get more information about SZL Server also at our website, and of course you can send an email to Tecplot Support to ask additional questions. Thank you again. Thank you, Dave.

Dave Taflin: You are welcome, and happy Tecplotting, all.

Try Tecplot 360 for Free

The post Fast, Secure Remote Data Access – Tecplot SZL Server appeared first on Tecplot.

Description

An iso-volume is an important concept when you need to quantify the volume occupied by scaler or a set of scalar values. In ocean sciences, an iso-volume can be used to visualize and quantify values, like dissolved oxygen, an indicator of poor water quality. In diesel engines, an iso-volume can be used to identify regions in the cylinder contributing to emissions.

In this video, we will show you how to use Tecplot 360 to create an iso-volume based on two variables and to compute its volume as a quantitative measure.

We’ll start with a dataset already loaded. This dataset is a segment of the piston bowl in a diesel engine. Understanding regions that are generating emissions are an important aspect of diesel engine design. In this case, we want to identify regions of high nitric oxide, or NOx. Areas of high temperature contribute to the creation of this gas.

In this case, we want to identify regions where NOx is greater than .005 and temperature is above 2,000 Kelvin. To isolate this region, we will use value blanking to eliminate the regions where NOx and temperature are below our target values. Both NOx and temp are cell-centered variables, so we blank the cells when the primary, or cell-centered value, is blanked.

Try Tecplot 360 for Free »

Once you turn on value blanking, notice that your entire plot disappears. This is because we’ve only been visualizing the boundary data. The regions of high NOx and temperature exist only in the volume cells, so we must display the volume cells. We do this by displaying the exposed cell faces of the volume data. Click the Surfaces tab of the Zone Style dialog. We also want to continue to see the outer boundary of our dataset, so we change the boundary zones to ignore the value blanking constraints. Now we’ll change the shade color of the volume cells to red so that they’re easy to identify. Then, advance through time to see the propagation of our iso-volume through time.

Finally, we want to quantify the volume of these regions, which would allow us to measure the effectiveness of design changes that attempt to reduce NOx emissions. We’ll use Analyze > Perform Integration, to integrate the volume of the remaining cells. For the domain of integration, choose Integrate by time strands and select the time strand for the volume cells. Ensure that you select Exclude blanked regions since we’re using value blanking to define the iso-volume.

Now we want to plot the results so we will toggle off Show tabulated results and toggle on Plot results as. Clicking Integrate will plot the results.

This data can then be saved to a file, or the results from other simulations can be imported for comparison purposes.

To repeat this process for other datasets, we could record our steps with a macro or Python script.

This concludes the tutorial for analyzing iso-volumes. Thank you for watching.

Try Tecplot 360 for Free

The post Computing Iso-volumes Using Value Blanking appeared first on Tecplot.

The Webinar, Getting Started with Tecplot for CONVERGE has been transcribed, edited and posted here to give you written tips, tricks and tutorials for using Tecplot for CONVERGE. We encourage you to follow along in the Webinar as you read this.

In June of 2018, Tecplot, Inc. and Convergent Science formed a partnership to distribute (to all users of CONVERGE software) a version of Tecplot 360 called Tecplot for CONVERGE. This blog starts with an introduction by Tiffany Cook, Partner and Public Relations Manager at Convergent Science. Then Scott Fowler, Tecplot 360 Product Manager, will talk briefly about Tecplot products and services. The rest is a tutorial for using Tecplot for CONVERGE.

Convergent Science

Speaker: Tiffany Cook

All right, Scott, thank you. For those who are not familiar with Convergent Science, we were established by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Three of the owners are at our home base, or headquarters, which is also located in Madison, Wisconsin.

We have offices in Texas, Michigan, Austria and India, in addition to distribution in Asia through our collaboration with IDAJ. I’d also like to add, trainings in the US and Europe are free of charge, and we do offer licenses to universities at a reduced or zero cost.

As Scott mentioned, we joined forces with Tecplot in June of this year, and we’re just really excited about the partnership. With our partnership, CONVERGE users have access to Tecplot for CONVERGE at no charge, so as you learn more today, we definitely encourage you to take advantage of their post processing capability.

To further give you a little bit of background about CONVERGE CFD, we pride ourselves on its key feature, which is AMR, adaptive mesh refinement, and that basically eliminates the grid generation bottleneck from the CFD simulation process. And if you’re familiar with our code, you know we’ve done quite well in the internal combustion engine area, but CONVERGE can also be applied to the application areas that you see here. And along with the benefits indicated, CONVERGE also has various options for chemistry, spray models, combustion models, emission and turbulence.

CONVERGE has been commercially available for about 10 years, and at this point, approximately 95% of U.S. engine manufacturers use CONVERGE, and 85% of engine makers in Europe and Japan are using CONVERGE. So you can see that our reach is beyond the U.S. We are a global company.

We are in the process of completing CONVERGE 3.0, which will have significant improvements in scalability and boundary layer meshing. The estimated release date is early 2019.

Finally, I’d like to mention that we also have an upcoming webinar next Wednesday. It’s focused on after treatment, so I’d like to invite you to visit our website, check out our resources and also upcoming events to get more detailed information on CONVERGE. www.convergecfd.com.

And with that being said, I will turn the control back over to Scott.

Speaker: Scott Fowler

Great. Thanks Tiffany. I would like to also mention that we are very happy with the partnership with Convergent Science. It’s been a great, and we’ve certainly learned a lot about internal combustion engines on our side, and we are excited to move forward and to provide great software to users of CONVERGE.

Tecplot, Inc. at a Glance

Tecplot was founded in 1981 by a couple of Boeing engineers. Our background is largely external aerodynamics. We are the largest independent CFD post processor in the world, with approximately 47,000 users worldwide.

We’re known for being the most complete and flexible post processor, which I hope you’ll see today through our ability to do not only high quality 3D plots like you can see here on this slide, but also 2D and line plotting, with a lot of control over what you can do with the plot.

We are also trying to be very responsive to CFD community. We see dataset sizes are growing, people need to do more comparative analysis, so we’re working on techniques and tools for handling those needs.

We are trusted worldwide by some of the largest companies, particularly, you can see a lot of influence in aerospace, but we also do have some seats in automotive with Honda and Fiat, GE being used for the gas turbine section.

Tecplot 360

And just a quick tour of our products. Tecplot 360 is our flagship product. This is what Tecplot for CONVERGE is based on, and this is what you’re going to see in the demo today. So this is our primary tool for looking at CFD and test data.

Chorus

Chorus is available if you purchase a fully licensed version of Tecplot 360. Chorus helps you explore large datasets for multiple simulations, and compare those results. So if you’re doing an ensemble analysis, this is going to be a nice tool for you.

PyTecplot

PyTecplot is a Python API that we released in early 2017. PyTecplot is available with the full version of Tecplot 360. It’s also available with Tecplot for CONVERGE. The one limitation is, in Tecplot for CONVERGE, you cannot use this in batch mode. PyTecplot really offers a lot of additional capability, and has allowed many of our users to do advanced analysis that they weren’t able to do before. It gives you full access to the raw data behind your simulation, so you can perform interesting calculations and automate workflows. You can see here that, compared to the Tecplot macro language when doing a complex mathematical operation, we were able to get the speed from 18 minutes down to 7.3 seconds. So quite an advantage there in using the Python API.

Tecplot for CONVERGE

What is Tecplot for CONVERGE? Tecplot for CONVERGE is effectively Tecplot 360 with just a few minor limitations. It is included with your CONVERGE Studio license, so if you do need access to Tecplot for CONVERGE, Convergent Science can give you access to the download and license for Tecplot for CONVERGE. Like Tiffany said, it’s free of charge with your purchase of CONVERGE and access to CONVERGE Studio.

Tecplot for CONVERGE is a nearly full featured version of Tecplot 360. The limitations are:

• No batch mode operations. If you do need to use batch mode, you will have to purchase the full version of Tecplot 360.
• Limited to one page and five frames. If you’re not familiar with those terms, you will see them during the demo.
• Loads only data produced by CONVERGE.

So, we want CONVERGE users to have a very full-featured, a very performant application, and that’s what you’re getting with Tecplot for CONVERGE.

Here are the differences in a table. Tecplot for CONVERGE has a small watermark, license and download is all from Convergent Science. The scripting is available in the GUI (graphical user interface) only. If you do upgrade to the full Tecplot 360, you will have access to batch mode. And then one of the key things here is, the bottom line, number of CPUs that Tecplot for CONVERGE uses, we put no limitation on that. So you can use all the horsepower you have available on your workstation.

Tecplot for CONVERGE Tutorials

Now I’ll jump into a demonstration of Tecplot 360. And again, everything that I’m going to show you today can also be done in Tecplot for CONVERGE. So we’ll go through working with CONVERGE data. I’m going to be using an internal combustion case, like the one that you see in the plot here.

One of the critical things is that you do have to use post_convert to convert your data to Tecplot format. Use the most recent version of post_convert you can get, because we do put a little checksum in the files to ensure that the files loaded can be loaded in Tecplot for CONVERGE. So if you have previous Tecplot PLT files that you had created, those may not load in Tecplot for CONVERGE, so just make sure that you’re using the latest post_convert.

In this demo, you will how to:

• Use slices and iso-surfaces
• Display parcels
• Compute mass flow rate
• Use cell average output files
• Export images and movies

Tecplot 360 User Interface

If you haven’t seen the user interface before, I’ll just give you a quick tour. When you launch Tecplot 360, you see in the middle here what we call the welcome screen. There are some really nice resources here, particularly the documentation and the Quick Reference Guide. There are a number of keyboard shortcuts and mouse shortcuts that are going to be useful for streamlining your work flow. So please take a look at this Quick Reference Guide.

Online Resources

• Getting Started with Tecplot for CONVERGE Webinar
• Tecplot for CONVERGE Video Tutorials
• Tecplot 360 Documentation
• Tecplot Technical Support
• Convergent Science Technical Support

If you do have any questions or need help, you can always contact support@tecplot.com. The support staff at Convergent Science are also trained in Tecplot 360, so you can start there as well. So, please, do come back to this welcome screen. If this welcome screen is not visible, you can always get to it by going View > Welcome Screen.

Loading Data

Let’s start with loading some data. I’ve already run this data through post_convert, so I’ll just go File > Load Data. I have here 145 time steps, ranging from crank angle -381 all the way to crank angle 340. This is total about 12 GB of data, and just to give you a frame of reference, the machine that I’m on is an 8 core, or 8 CPU laptop with about 32 GB of RAM. It’s about three or four years old. So it’s not exactly state of the art, but I think that you’ll see that the performance is quite good.

Now that we’re in Tecplot and we have the data loaded, just a couple of terms. We have, in the middle area, we call this the workspace. We have what we call here a frame, and a frame contains the data and will result in a plot. On the sidebar here, we have what we call the plot sidebar. So this will affect the look and feel of your data. And you’ll see me use these throughout the presentation today.

Data Set Information

One of the first dialogs that is critical is the Data Set Info dialog. And this will let you know what data we have loaded. You can see that I have what’s called a zone. A zone is simply a collection of data. So zone number one is my CONVERGE volume cells, the grid that’s produced through that adaptive mesh refinement technique that Tiffany was talking about. You can see that this zone is of type polyhedron, these are volume cells, with about 127,000 elements, at solution time, or crank angle, -381.

These zones are also given another identifier called a strand, and this is going to be important later in the demo. Strand ID of one, a strand is just a way of describing a like set of data through time. So you can see the grid, the volume cells, are assigned to strand one. If I go down to another crank angle, it’s still assigned to strand one at a different crank angle.

Same sort of thing for boundaries. Boundary number one is assigned to strand number two. If I go down, boundary number one again, strand number two. So this is just a way to identify like data through time.

Another interesting thing that you’ll see here in Data Set Info dialog is the variable information. This says variable status not loaded. Tecplot has actually not gone through the effort of loading this data yet. We use a technique called Load on Demand to reduce the amount of RAM required to generate a plot. In this case, the only information that we need to display are the surfaces, or the boundaries, so none of the information for the volume has actually been loaded yet.

The rest of the data will get loaded when we add a slice or an iso-surface. Keep in mind that, while it says not loaded, it is available, and Tecplot 360 will load it as it’s needed. Tecplot will also unload data as it’s no longer needed, to reduce the memory footprint on your machine.

Zone Styles

Let’s also bring up what we call the Zone Style dialog. This is also a critical dialog for setting the style of your plot. And you’ll see that there is quite a lot of similarity in what we have in data set info and zone style. There is a much shorter list of zones. So again, the grid is all strand number one, and so this is just in this first entry. So as I advance through time, you can see the Zone Style dialog advances. And so we can see that what we’re actually seeing in this plot is, or are the zones associated with crank angle -365.

So that’s a quick demonstration of the Zone Style dialog and Data Set Info dialog. Again, the asterisk here indicates that these are zones through time. We will come back to those dialogs later in the demo.

Slices (and Keyboard Shortcuts)

Let’s take a look at this data set. One of the first things that we want to do, is inspect the mesh that CONVERGE creates, and a great way to look at that adaptive mesh is through slices. So let’s go ahead and put in a slice. I’m going to use the Slicing tool.

I can just click on the plot, and click right in the middle. I’ll just tell you a couple of keyboard shortcuts here. For rotation, you can use the rotation tools in the ribbon, or just hold down the CTRL key and right click, and I can rotate the plot around.

Now I can’t see the slice very well, so let’s turn on translucency. I actually want to see the interior, so we will use a setting called Value Blanking to see the interior. Select Plot > Blanking > Value Blanking, and we’ll say when X is greater than zero, and we’ll turn that on. And now we can see the interior of this cylinder.

Zooming in and out is done by holding down the middle mouse button. Translation, hold down the right mouse button. Rotate, CTRL and right mouse button.

Now, if I want to set the center of rotation, rotating this around, I can just hover over, and I’ll hit the O key on the keyboard. This is a really critical thing, so now I’m rotating about this point. If I want to rotate about this point way on the left, I hit the O key over here, and you can see it’s rotating around that. So the O key is a really critical keyboard shortcut.

Again, go back to the Welcome Screen and look at that Quick Reference Guide, and you’ll see all those shortcuts.

Adaptive Mesh

Now let’s say I want to look at the mesh. I can simply right click on that slice, and toggle on the mesh. Let’s say I want to look at temperature on this slice. I can just use this toolbar and select Temperature. And now let’s go ahead and we’ll just advance through time, and we can see how this adaptive mesh develops as we’re going through our simulation.

Iso-surface Details

Another thing that we may want to do is look at an iso-surface of a particular temperature to visualize the flame front. So let’s go ahead and pause this animation.

Point of note here, it says drawing interrupted. There are two ways to get out of this. One, you can just click Redraw on the sidebar here, or middle mouse click will also perform a redraw, as just a quick shortcut. Anytime you hit Pause, or sometimes if a redraw is taking a long time, and you want to continue doing your work, you don’t have to wait for the redraw. You can just keep clicking, but it will interrupt that redraw.

We want to look at an iso-surface of the flame front. So, let’s define that using the Iso-surface Details dialog. We want to do an iso-surface of temperature, and let’s say we want to do a specific value of 1500, and we’ll toggle this on to display it.

And you can see, we have another contour legend on the plot. This iso-surface is being contoured by mass, but let’s say we want the contours to be by temperature as well. And we see no iso-surface at this point. The iso-surface at this point is not quite at the combustion phase, let’s just move in. And we can see the start of the iso-surface here. As we advance through time, you can see this iso-surface is getting clipped by the value blanking, but we want to see the entire iso-surface. On the Iso-surface Details dialog, we have this option says, “obey sources of blanking.” The volume-cell zone that this iso-surface is going through is being clipped by the value blanking constraint. We want to turn this off so we can see the full iso-surface. Now it’s not constrained by that value blanking. And again, we can animate through time and see that flame front develop.

Plot Annotations

Okay, now let’s do a couple of other things here. Let’s say that we want to see the entire boundary again, so go in and we’ll turn off the value blanking constraints. And I want to know what crank angle we’re at while we’re on the plot. I can use plot annotations. Here I’m using a text annotation tool (Text Details Dialog) and I’m going to type Crank: &(SOLUTIONTIME) And then I’ll use a piece of what we call dynamic text. This is text that’s going to update as we’re animating through time. And we’re going to say solution time. And then we hit Accept, and then as we add advanced through time, this piece of text is going to update.

Now we do have some flexibility here in the formatting. I don’t need that many digits of precision, so I’ll add to the plot annotation Crank: &(SOLUTIONTIME%0.2f) and we’re now limiting it to two-digit precision. Nice way to get an annotation on the plot.

Parcels

We’ve briefly talked about slices, we’ve briefly talked about iso-surfaces, little bit of rotation and keyboard shortcuts, translucency. Let’s move on to showing parcels. This simulation does have spray in it. We’ll go ahead and turn off our iso-surfaces and our slices. And now this is where we’re going to come into the Zone Style dialog and deal with the zone layers.

We’ll launch Zone Style dialog. And we see that, we do have a zone here called spray and in order to visualize this, we need to show scatter. The scattered layer. Scattered plot and layer is what we want to look at here, you can see the Tecplot has turned the default to show scatter for everything, we want to show it only for the spray zone. Go ahead and select all of those, turn it off for everything but spray. And then we can toggle it on here on the sidebar.

Now we can see our particles. The default is square. I prefer points in this case, so let’s change it to points. And let’s say we want to color these by a specific variable. We can do that as well. We’ll go in to the outline color – just a note, I’m right clicking on these columns to make the selection – so it’s a right click. This launches a dialog and I’m given a color chooser and I want to use multiple and multi-color option or a contour color. Now I’m going to have to select multi 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. What does that mean? This is associated with what we call the contour details. Anytime you’re using multi-color, it’s important you understand contour detail. Let’s go ahead and close the Zone Style dialog and launch the Contour Details dialog.

I currently have my contour groups here, let’s assign contour group 1 to DP_film_flag. That’s what I’m going to color these particles by. And I know that film flag has values from zero to five, I’ll go ahead and set up my contour levels this way: min, max and a delta. And through playing with this I know that qualitative dark two is a nice color wrap to use when coloring by film flag. Okay, now I’ve set up what we call a contour group, with a specific type of coloring you can see earlier when I was using temperature that’s associated with contour group 3. Now I can right click here, select multi 1. And these are now colored by film flag and I have a contour legend that has been displayed showing my values.

Let’s back up to right around when those particles had the sprays injected, and as we advance through time here, we can see the propagation of the spray and we can see how the film flag value changes.

Let’s say I want to isolate particles that have a specific film flag value. Again, this is where we can use value blanking. We’ll go back into the Value Blanking dialog and select DP_film_flag not equal to zero. This will show me only the particles (or spray) that is “not in the wall film”. If we want to look at the particles or spray that are only in the wall film, we can assign a value of one.

Macros

You may not always remember the meaning of each one of these values 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This is where you can use Tecplot scripting capabilities. We have what we call the Quick Macro Panel and you can see that I’ve added a few things that are specific to CONVERGE data.

Our macro language is pretty robust. We have a way to prompt for instructions, that’s what we’re going to do here. I’m going to double click on Show specific parcels, and this pops up a little prompt dialog that says, “enter the parcel type to display.” And I’ve entered some strings here to help me remember what each one of these values means. If I want to look just at my rebounded particles, I can just hit the value two and when I hit okay notice that the Value Blanking dialog updates as well.

Now I’m looking at only the rebounded parcels or if I want to go back to looking at the ones that are not in the wall film, hit zero. If you have repetitive tasks or have just a couple of buttons that you don’t remember how to use very often, you can use the scripting language and register some commands right over here on the Quick Macro Panel, that’s a nice feature to use.

Instead of just using points for parcels, we may want to use spheres. Spheres are more expensive to draw; you’ll see the redraw speed does slow down a bit here. We’ll say spheres and then I want to size these, say by their radius. Select a variable, select DP_radius and then finally assign it to DP_radius.

You can see that the particles are quite small and let’s turn off the value blanking so we can see more of the more of the parcels. You can see we have some larger radius spray particles up here at the injector, and as we advance through time it’s going to advance a bit slower now because those spheres are a bit more expensive to draw, but they do make a great looking image for final presentations.

You will see that this animation did speed up a little bit. That’s in part because data have already been loaded for these time steps, we do cache data in RAM as much as we can. And we also have a smaller grid up here at top dead center and fewer parcels, it’s just less work for the graphics card at that point.

Computing Mass Flow Rate

Let’s move on to doing some more analysis. We’ll look at how to compute mass flow rate. This is going to involve slices again. Let’s go ahead and turn off scatter, value blanking is turned off. And what I want to do is, I want to look at mass flow rate and what we’re going to do, is we’re actually going to compare it to results that were produced by CONVERGE itself. If I click here you can see that I have boundary even selected, I do have a CONVERGE output file that has mass flow rate for this boundary. We’re going to compute mass flow rate in this region.

To do that, we have to place a slice. Tecplot will operate on, will do analysis on, the zones only. The slices are what we call derived objects, we can’t actually perform calculations on those slices, we have to extract them to zones.

Let’s first place this slice. I have a slice here, and I want it to be aligned with the boundary. I’ll choose the Slice location as Arbitrary. And then I can use a 3-Points probe tool to get it to align with that boundary. And then I’m going to move it in, just a little bit to make sure that I’m cutting through the volume cells.

Again, we need to compute the mass flow rate, but we need zones. If I go back into Data Set Info dialog, you can see I don’t have, slices don’t show up any anywhere here. These are a transaction object. We need to make these an object that is static, for lack of a better term.

We’ll go into Data > Extract > Extract Slices Over Time. This is going to step through each time step. It’s going to slice that volume mesh or the volume grid and it’s going to extract or create a zone out of these slices. It should take about a minute, to a minute and a half to perform.

I’ll bring up the task manager in windows here. You can see that we’re using a large amount of CPU here. You have access to all the cores on your machine using Tecplot for CONVERGE and you can see the memory is climbing as we’re loading the data required to do this extraction. And again, Tecplot will manage this memory for you. Those previous time steps, -381 up to top dead center in that region that are not currently needed for this plot. If we were to run out of memory or get close to the memory limit on your machine Tecplot will start unloading that memory. We do a pretty good job of managing the RAM for you.

This is just a few steps from done and then we’ll be able to move on to the actual mass flow rate calculation. Alright, we’re done. Now if we go into Data Set Info dialog and scroll all the way to the bottom, you can see that we have new zones FE – Polyhedron. These are surface cells and we have one for each time step. And you can see that they have a new strand number. So each one of these is going to be associated with the same Time Strand. So again, a grouping of data through time is a Time Strand.

You can also see this show up in the Zone Style dialog. We’ve extracted those, it’s not enabled by default, but if we turn it on, you can see that it’s coincident with the slice. We’ll just go ahead and turn that back off. To compute mass flow rate, we go into the Analyze menu and we’re going to say Perform integration and select Mass Flow Rate. We’re going to choose, Integrate by: Time Strands. This is going to integrate across all of those slices through time. We’re going to select those slice zones that we just created. And we’re going to set Plot Results As to Mass Flow Rate. I’m going to hit Integrate, and it’s going to give me an error and I’ll explain the error.

Error: The current field variables don’t define the required convection variables. Please set them in the Field Variables dialog.

In order to compute mass flow rate, we need to know convective and state variables and that’s available here under Analyze > Field Variables. We need to do the following:

• Define our velocity components u, v, w
• Select pressure and temperature
• Set the proper gas constant: Analyze > Fluid Properties
  For this data set we’re using 287.

Now we’ve given all of the information we need to compute mass flow rate, and we can simply hit Integrate. It goes through this process quite quickly, and we get a new plot that shows us our mass flow rate at this location.

As I move over to this line plot, you can see our plot sidebar changed. It says that we’re in XY Line mode, and we have a number of attributes showing line symbols. Again, we can right click on the plot and toggle the symbols off and make the line little bit thicker. Let’s go up to point four so we can see that a little better.

As we advance through time, you can see a timing mark that moves to show where we are in relation.

I want to compare this to the results that CONVERGE creates. We will open up another file we’re going to append data to this frame. Earlier in the presentation we talked about pages and frames you’re limited to one page which is one work area here and five frames in Tecplot for CONVERGE. In this plot I have two frames. You can see you can get quite a lot of work done within those limits, one page and five frames.

Let’s load the CONVERGE output file, area_avg_flow.out. Tecplot 360 has a number of different loaders. You will probably not see this dialog with Tecplot for CONVERGE because it has fewer loaders.

Tecplot 360 asks us if we want to replace the data or if we want to append the data, and we want to append the data to this frame.

The CONVERGE file has a different variable names than what we had currently loaded in the data set. We need to tell Tecplot which variables mean the same thing, in this case we need to Combine:

• Crank (DEG) = 1: Solution Time
• Mass Flow Rate (kg/s) = 2: Mass Flow Rate

The rest of the variables don’t need to be imported at this time. I’ll just go ahead and hit OK.

You can see that the plot labels changed and let’s see what is available in Data > Data Set Info. You can see we a couple of new zones and we will clean up the zone names (double click to edit). Strand 169 – these are the results of the Mass Flow Rate. Then we have variables, and let’s clean up the variable names to Crank (DEG) and Mass Flow Rate (kg/s). Average area flow bound ID 7 (area_avg_flow_bound id_7) is what I want to plot in the line plot to compare the computer to CONVERGE result.

To do that, will go into the Mapping Style dialog. This is a lot like the Zone Style dialog but for line data. We have one line-map available right now, we’re going to create a new line map to show Crank vs. Mass Flow Rate for zone 2:area_avg_flow_bound id_7, which is the boundary ID at this location, I’m going to use a key word here called “&ZN” to call the map by the zone name. You can see the map name captures zone name.

In the line plot, turn off the symbol layer. I’m going to do CNTL F to fit the data. And you can see that we have pretty good agreement with the output from CONVERGE if we zoom in close and we turn on the symbol layer again, you can see that we have a lot more resolution in the data.

We have a lot of control over the symbol shapes. Let’s change both of these to circles, make them quite a bit smaller and fill them. Then, we’ll fit again using CNTL F. You can see that we have a lot of control over the plot and over the axis, as well. You have interactive control with the label – you can see the label is overlapping the title – so we will use our adjuster tool and move the labels.

Let’s say I want to get his plot ready for final presentation. We can disable the background, hide the border, and resize the plot. Let’s move the legend out, and then we’ll zoom out. Now we have a multi-frame plot, and we can then animate this to a file.

Let’s go into Solution Time > Details. You see we have this film strip icon, we can select a number of different movie formats (AVI, Flash, MPEG4, Raster Metafile, WMV):

• MPEG4 seems to be the most portable. I would encourage you to use MP4
• Specify width – 1024 is a nice width.
• Use what we call, anti-aliasing which will smooth out any lines.
• Specify animation speed.

I’m not going to hit okay right now because it takes about eight minutes to render this to a movie file. But you can see that you do have the various export formats for creating movies.

If you wanted to create just a still image of this, go to File > Export, and there are a number of raster and vector export options. The most common is PNG for the raster formats. For the vector formats, PostScript or EPS work quite well. WMF works very well on Windows platforms. Quite a lot of capability there.

I did generate a movie earlier. So, let’s just bring that up and we can show you an animation created with this data. Again, this took about eight minutes to render on this machine.

Macro and Python Scripts

Let me finish up the presentation with a brief discussion of macros, Python scripts, and other various file formats that we have. We did a lot of work to create this plot. Let’s say we don’t want to redo all the point and click effort every single time. You do have the ability to record Python and macros under the scripting menu. The Tecplot Macro Language is a pretty easy to understand human readable language. We’ve done a great job with Python over the last few years. You do have a couple of different options for scripting.

Again, Tecplot for CONVERGE allow these scripts to run from the user interface with the GUI up. If you do need batch mode scripting, then you will have to purchase a full version of Tecplot 360. Please keep in mind that you do have the ability to do scripting, just not in batch mode.

If you want to save your work, there are a couple of different ways to do that. You save a layout, which will save the state of everything you have here. But layouts if you do a slice extraction like we did here will “dirty the data”. So, it will ask you to write out the data set. In that case, a better option may be a combination of macros and style sheets. Again, a layout is going to save the state of all the frames. Here we have two frames, and it’s going to retain links to the data. A style sheet is going to save the state of just one individual frame. So there are a couple of different ways to save your work.

I really like our Python layer. Let me show you one of the really neat things you can do with Python. I’ve registered a Python script on the Quick Macro Panel. This Python script actually constructs a small user interface using PyQT. It interfaces directly with Tecplot 360:

• Add Crank Angle. We added crank angle on the plot earlier. Let’s say I don’t want to remember the keywords for adding crank angle to the plot. Well, I built this little user interface I can just click Add Crank Angle and it adds the crank angle.
• Add RPM of this simulation; I can get it in one click.
• Jump to Crank Angle. Let’s say I change Solution Time pretty frequently, and I always know I want to go to a bottom dead center. Just type -180 and jump to that crank angle.
• Parcels to Show. Let’s turn scatter back on here. Here I have a nice drop down that says, let’s show just the ones that are in the wall film. So, again, this behind the scenes is changing those value, blank, and constraints. Let’s say I want to go back to see all of them.

You can do quite a lot with the Python layer that you can’t do with macros. Macros are great for simple scripting. Python is great for, not only complex user interfaces like this but, if you want to integrate with other tools or do advanced analysis, deal with the file system, Python API is really great.

Conclusion

There’s a lot more that you can do with Tecplot 360 and I encourage you to ask questions of Tecplot, Inc. and Convergent Science, on how to use Tecplot for CONVERGE.

Just to round out, we are focused on solving the big problems in CFD post processing. Tecplot 360 can process large datasets very quickly using all the CPUs on your machine and our load on demand technology.

Tecplot Chorus, which we did not demonstrate today, but we do have a number of webinars and videos on our website for Tecplot Chorus. That’s for ensembles or multiple simulations.

You saw a pretty good demo of PyTecplot and what you can do with it. Again, Chorus and PyTecplot are included with the full paid version of Tecplot 360. If you are interested in upgrading to the full version of Tecplot 360, we do offer discounts for CONVERGE users. I encourage you to contact our sales team to inquire about that.

Request a quote for Tecplot for CONVERGE

With that, I’d like to again, thank Tiffany and Convergent Science for being a great partner and allowing us to provide great post processing tools for the CONVERGE community.

The Questions from this Webinar is be up in about a week – so stay tuned!

The post Tecplot for CONVERGE Tips, Tricks and Tutorials appeared first on Tecplot.

My name is Chris Berger and I’m research faculty in Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Portland State University (PSU). I’ve been using Tecplot for over 25 years, primarily for generating contour plots, animations and x-y graphs that show water quality model predictions.

Over the past decade the research group I worked in has been the primary developer of the model CE-QUAL-W2, a 2-dimensional, width-averaged hydrodynamic and water quality model that predicts temperature, flow, water level, dissolved oxygen, pH, algae, and other water quality constituents.

How do we use Tecplot 360?

Located in northeastern Washington State, Lake Roosevelt was formed through the impoundment of the Columbia River behind Grand Coulee Dam. See more CE-QUAL-W2 projects »

When animating contour plots, Tecplot 360 is helpful in illustrating model predictions and showing how the model “works” at conferences and in meetings with clients and stakeholders.

Tecplot 360’s contour animations are also very useful in debugging and allow us to observe model predictions (lots and lots of numbers that are output by the model for different times and locations). If the model is predicting a water temperature that doesn’t make sense, we know to check inputs, and to make sure that the model is conserving mass and energy. For instance, if a river model is predicting a river water temperature of 1500 Celsius in a single model cell in the finite difference grid, we know that there is problem. In addition to debugging, animating model predictions in Tecplot 360 helps us understand why the model is making certain predictions.

One specific instance involved Lake Whatcom near Bellingham, Washington. Lake Whatcom is mostly a deep lake with one large, deep basin connected to two other shallow basins. The basins are separated by relatively shallow sills. The bottom elevation of the sills was critical because cold water from the deep basin would “leak” into the shallower basins. We were confused about the measured water temperatures in the shallow basins and by creating a model in Tecplot 360 we were able to understand what was happening.

If we need to make many plots, we use the macro abilities of Tecplot 360. We also use macros to post-process model predictions to create static x-y plots. We usually generate WMF images which are then imported into our reports and PowerPoint presentations.

Portland State University’s Water Quality Workshop

El Diquis, Costa Rica

The next workshop is June 17-21, 2019 at the PSU campus.

We also use Tecplot 360 for the annual Water Quality Workshop that we teach every June. In the computer lab section of the workshop, we use Tecplot macros to rapidly process the predictions of the model example problems that the participants are working on. This allows participants to learn more quickly about the CE-QUAL-W2 model and learn more about Tecplot 360!

The class is taught to professionals (engineers, managers and scientists) who would like to apply the water quality model CE-QUAL-W2. Over the past decade, Portland State University has been the primary developer of CE-QUAL-W2.

I invite you to get more information or register for the workshop.

Water Quality Workshop Information and Registration

Oroville, California

The post Detecting Problems with Your Water Quality Model Predictions appeared first on Tecplot.

This blog answers 9 questions about Tecplot for CONVERGE. Asked in our Getting Started with Tecplot for CONVERGE webinar, they are answered by Scott Fowler, Tecplot Product Manager, and Tiffany Cook, Partner and Public Relations Manager, Convergent Science.

Questions from the Webinar “Getting Started with Tecplot for CONVERGE”

Watch the Webinar

Learn More About Tecplot for CONVERGE

The post 9 Questions About Tecplot for CONVERGE appeared first on Tecplot.

Join us for a training session on Tecplot for CONVERGE

Friday, 15 March, 15:15, Room 2
Hotel Porta Fira, Plaça d’Europa 45, L’Hospitalet de Llobrega
Barcelona, 08908, Spain

Learn how to load, manipulate and export CONVERGE data in Tecplot 360. We will start with a quick tour of the Tecplot 360 user interface, then will jump into these topics:

• post_convert Utility
• Loading Cell-Averaged Output Files
• Parcels
• Slices & Iso-surfaces
• Computing Mass Flow Rate
• Animation and Movie File Export
• Python scripting and automation

Register for the Conference

Learn more about Tecplot for CONVERGE »
Watch these Tecplot for CONVERGE video tutorials »

The post CONVERGE User Conference – Barcelona 2019 appeared first on Tecplot.

Developing a method of simulating fish behavior can lead to protecting and preserving migratory fish runs. One of our most loved blogs, originally titled “Some Fishy Business for the Army Corps of Engineers” was written in 2011. It has been updated and is re-posted here.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) mission is to provide vital public engineering services in peace and war to strengthen our nation’s security, energize the economy, and reduce risks from disasters. Maintaining the nation’s inland waterways is found beneath that large umbrella and in support of that mission, USACE has been developing an exciting new way of protecting and preserving migratory fish runs.

Tecplot 360 Reads Many CFD Solution File Formats

Dr. Goodwin contracts with companies to produce the CFD results he needs. Due to the large number of CFD simulation codes in use today, he was finding it increasingly important to modify his code to read a wide variety of CFD solution file formats, including the n-faced polyhedral meshes used by two of the most popular CFD solvers.

After examining a number of options, he selected Tecplot 360 to do this work for him. This was a good fit because Tecplot 360 already reads the most popular CFD file formats, and has an extensible architecture that allows Dr. Goodwin’s solver to interact with any data Tecplot 360 can read. And I was the lucky Tecplot developer selected to do the interfacing work.

I subsequently wrote a CFD post-processing Tecplot add-on to perform some clean-up operations on legacy CFD data to make it suitable input for Dr. Goodwin’s simulations. This “fishy business” was challenging and interesting, and I have enjoyed seeing the results that Dr. Goodwin produced with Tecplot assistance.

And finally, a required disclaimer: Any statements, opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the federal sponsors, and no official endorsement should be inferred.

By Dave Taflin
Developer | Tecplot, Inc.
Read Dave’s employee profile »

The post Simulating Fish Behavior to Protect Migratory Fish Runs appeared first on Tecplot.

Data Alteration through Equations

This blog was originally published in 2013 and has been updated and expanded.

The post Calculating a New Variable appeared first on Tecplot.

Understanding What Customers are Seeing

To understand what our customers were seeing, we needed to be able to run our software on hardware representative of what our customers were running on, namely, a supercomputer. The problem is that we don’t own one. We also needed parallel profiling software that would help us identify bottlenecks, or “hot spots,” in our code, including in the MPI inter-process communication. We made some progress in Amazon EC2 using open-source profiling software, but had greater success using Arm (formerly Allinea) Forge software at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

NCSA has an industrial partners program that provides access to their iForge supercomputer and a wide array of open source and commercial software, including Arm Forge. iForge has over 2,000 CPU cores and runs IBM’s GPFS parallel file system, so it was a good platform to test our software. Arm Forge, specifically its MAP profiling tool, provided the ability to easily identify hot spots in our software, and to drill down through the layers of our source code to see exactly where the performance problems lay.

An additional application to NCSA also gave us access to their Blue Waters petascale supercomputer, which features about 400,000 CPU cores and the Lustre parallel file system¹. This gave us the ability to scale our testing up to larger problems, and to test the performance on another popular parallel file system.

Arm MAP with Region of Time Selected

Performance Improvement Results

Using iForge hardware and Arm Forge software, we were able to identify two sources of performance problems in TecIO-MPI:

• Excessive time spent in writing small chunks of data to disk.
• Too much inter-process exchange of small chunks of data.

Consolidating these has led to an order-of-magnitude reduction in output time. Testing with three different computational fluid dynamics (CFD) flow solvers indicates output times, for structured or unstructured grids, roughly equal to the time required to compute a single solver iteration.

We will continue to collect feedback from users with an eye to additional improvements as TecIO-MPI is implemented in additional solvers. We invite you to provide us with your own experience!

Take our TecIO Survey

How to Obtain TecIO Libraries

TecIO and TecIO-MPI, along with instructions in Tecplot’s Data Format Guide, are installed with every Tecplot 360 installation.

It is recommended, however, that you obtain and compile source for TecIO-MPI applications, because the various MPI implementations are not binary-compatible. Source for TecIO and TecIO-MPI, and the Data Format Guide, are all available via a My Tecplot account.

For more information and access to the TecIO Library, please visit:

TecIO Library

¹This research is part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

By Dr. David E. Taflin
Senior Software Development Engineering | Tecplot, Inc.
Read Dave’s employee profile »

The post Improving TecIO-MPI’s Parallel Output Performance appeared first on Tecplot.

At the end of February 2019, I did a presentation at the SIAM Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in Spokane Washington. I live in the Seattle area, and Spokane is reasonably close, so I decided to drive instead of fly. Unfortunately, the entire nation, including Washington state, was still in the grips of the dreaded “polar vortex.” The night before my drive to Spokane all of the mountain passes were closed due to heavy snowfall. They opened in time but the drive was slippery and slow. I probably should have taken a flight instead! On the drive, I came up with this Haiku…

The Goal: Adding Parallel SZL Output to SU2

My presentation at the SIAM CSE conference was on the progress made adding parallel SZL (SubZone Load-on-demand) file output to SU2. The SU2 suite is an open-source collection of C++ based software tools for performing Partial Differential Equation (PDE) analysis and solving PDE-constrained optimization problems. The toolset is designed with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and aerodynamic shape optimization in mind, but is extensible to treat arbitrary sets of governing equations such as potential flow, elasticity, electrodynamics, chemically-reacting flows, and many others. SU2 is under active development by individuals all around the world on GitHub and is released under an open-source license. For more details, visit SU2 on Github.

The Challenge: Building System Compatibility

We implemented parallel SZL output in SU2 using the TecIO-MPI library, available for free download from the TecIO page. In some CFD codes, such as NASA’s FUN3D code, each user site is required to download and link the TecIO library. However, in the case of SU2 we decided to include the obfuscated TecIO source code directly into the distribution of SU2. This makes it much easier for the user – they need only download and build SU2 and they have SZL file output available.

However, this did add some complications from our end.

The main complication is that SU2 is built using the GNU configure system whereas TecIO is built using CMake. We had to create new automake, autoconfig, and m4 script files to seamlessly build TecIO as a part of the SU2 build.

If you find yourself integrating TecIO source into a CFD code built with the GNU configure system, feel free to shoot me some questions – scottimlay@tecplot.com

Implementing Serial vs. Parallel TecIO

Once TecIO was building as part of the SU2 build, it was straight-forward to get the serial version of SZL output working. SU2 already included an older version of TecIO, so we simply replaced those calls with the newer TecIO calls.

To get the parallel SZL output (using TecIO-MPI) working was a little more complicated. Specifically, it required knowing which nodes on each MPI rank were ghost nodes. Ghost nodes are nodes that are duplicated between partitions to facilitate the communication of solution data between MPI ranks. We only want the node to show up once in the SZL file, so we need to tell TecIO-MPI which nodes are the ghost nodes. In addition, CFD codes often utilize ghost cells (finite-element cells duplicated between MPI ranks) which must be supplied to TecIO-MPI. This information took a little effort to extract from the SU2 “output” framework.

The first test case is the Common Research Model from the
High-Lift Prediction workshop.

How Well Does It Perform?

We now have a version of SU2 that is capable of writing SZL files in parallel while being run on an HPC system. The next obvious questions: “How well does it perform?”

Test Case #1: Common Research Model (CRM) in High-Lift Configuration

The first test case is the Common Research Model from the High-Lift Prediction workshop. It was run with 3 grid refinement levels:

• 10 million cells
• 5 million cells
• 118 million cells

These refinements allowed us to measure the effect of problem size on the overhead of parallel output. All three cases were run on 640 MPI Ranks on the NCSA Blue Waters supercomputer. The results are shown in the following table:

For comparison we include the cost of incrementing the solution a single CFD time step and the cost of writing an SU2 restart file. It should be noted that the SU2 restart file only contains the conservative field variables – no grid variables and no auxiliary variables – so there is far less writing involved with the creation of the restart file. The cost of writing the SZL file is roughly 2.5 the cost of a single time step. If you write the SZL file infrequently (every 100 steps or so) this overhead is fairly small (2.5%).

Test Case #2: Inlet

The second test case is an inlet like you might find on the next generation jet fighter. It aggressively compresses the flow to keep the inlet as short as possible.

The inlet was analyzed using 93 million tetrahedral cells and 38 million nodes. As with the CRM case, the inlet case was run on the NCSA Blue Waters computer using 640 MPI ranks.

SU2 takes 74.7 seconds to increment the inlet CFD solution by one time-step and 31 seconds to write a restart file. To write the SZL plot file requires 216 seconds – 2.9 times as long as a single CFD time step.

Availability

The parallel SZL file output is currently in the pull-request phase of SU2 development. Once it is accepted it will be available in the Develop branch on GitHub. On occasion (I’m told every six months to a year), the develop branch is merged into the master branch. If you are interested in trying the parallel SZL output from SU2, send me an email (scottimlay@tecplot.com) and I’ll let you know which branch to download.

Better yet, subscribe to our TecIO Newsletter and we will send you the updates.

Subscribe to Tecplot

Scott Imlay
Chief Technical Officer
Tecplot, Inc.

The post Parallel SZL Output from SU2 appeared first on Tecplot.

Jonathan Whiting is a member of the hydrodynamic modeling group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State. He has been a Tecplot 360 user since 2014.

PNNL and the Salish Sea Model

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory with a main campus in Richland, Washington. The PNNL mission is to advance the frontiers of knowledge by taking on some of the world’s greatest science and technology challenges. The lab has distinctive strengths in chemistry, earth sciences and data analytics and deploys them to improve America’s energy resiliency and to enhance national security.

Jonathan is part of the Coastal Sciences Division at PNNL’s Marine Sciences Laboratory. The hydrodynamic modeling group in Seattle, WA works primarily to promote both ecosystem management and the restoration of the Salish Sea and Puget Sound with the Salish Sea Model.

The Salish Sea Model is a predictive ocean modeling tool for coastal estuarine research, restoration planning, water-quality management, and climate change response assessment. It was initially created to evaluate the sensitivity of Puget Sound acidification to ocean and fresh water inputs and to reproduce hypoxia in the Puget Sound while examining its sensitivity to nutrient pollution, funded by the Washington State Department of Ecology. Now it is being applied to answer the most pressing environmental challenges in the greater Salish Sea region.

PNNL is currently in the first year of a three-year project to enhance the Salish Sea Model. The goals are to increase the model’s resolution and to make it operational, which means assuring the model runs on schedule and gets results that are continuously available to the public—including predictions a week or so ahead. This will allow for new applications such as the tracking of oil spills during response activities.

Jonathan has worked with the modeling team on several habitat restoration planning projects along the Snoqualmie and Skagit rivers in Washington’s Puget Sound region. Jonathan was responsible for post-processing model outputs into analytical and geospatial products to meet client expectations and to convey findings that aid project planning and stakeholder engagement.

The Challenge: Creating Consistent, High-Quality Visualization for Model Post-Processing

The hydrodynamics modeling group uses the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) simulation code.

For the recent Skagit Delta Hydrodynamic Modeling project, a high-resolution triangular unstructured grid was created with 131,471 elements and 10 terrain-following sigma layers in the vertical plane. Post-processing was conducted on five time snapshots per scenario across 11 scenarios (including a baseline). Each file was about 55MB in uncompressed binary format.

The sheer quantity of plots was very challenging to handle, and it was important to generate clean plots that clearly conveyed results.

The Solution – Tecplot 360

Jonathan most often uses Tecplot 360 to generate top-down plots and videos that visualize parameters geospatially across an area. He then uses that visualization to convey meaningful project implications to his clients, who in turn use the products to inform program stakeholders and the public.

To handle the quantity of data Jonathan was working with, Tecplot 360 product manager Scott Fowler gave him a quick demonstration of Tecplot 360 and showed him how to use Chorus, the parametric design space analysis tool within Tecplot 360. Chorus allowed Jonathan to analyze a single dataset with multiple plots in a single view over time by using the matrix tool, easing the bulk generation of plots.

Tecplot support and development teams have been working closely with Jonathan, especially by adding new geospatial features to the software that enhance its automation and efficiency.

According to Jonathan, the key strengths in Tecplot’s software have been:

• Ease of use
• Availability of scripting to assist bulk processing
• Variety of tools and features, such as georeferenced images

Using Tecplot 360 has allowed Jonathan to create professional plots that enhance the impact of their modeling work.

How Will Jonathan Use Tecplot In the Future?

Jonathan’s personal niche has become trajectory modeling, so he is also interested in using Tecplot to generate visuals associated with the movement of objects on the surface by using streamlines, velocity gradients, slices, and more. He intends to take a deeper dive into the vast capabilities of Chorus and PyTecplot in the future!

Tecplot 360’s latest geoscience-focused release, Tecplot 360 2018 R2, includes the popular FVCOM loader and has the ability to insert georeferenced images that put your data in context. Tecplot 360 will automatically position and scale your georeferenced Google Earth or Bing Maps images.

Learn more about how Tecplot 360 is used for geoscience research.

Try Tecplot 360 for Free

The post Predictive Ocean Model Helps Coastal Estuarine Research appeared first on Tecplot.

PyTecplot and the Python multiprocessing module was the subject of our recent Webinar. PyTecplot already has a lot of great capability, and bringing in the Python multiprocessing toolkit allows you to accelerate your work and get it done even faster. This blog answers some questions asked during the Webinar.

1. What is PyTecplot?

Watch the Webinar: Analyze Your Time-Dependent Data 6x Faster

PyTecplot is an API to control Tecplot 360. PyTecplot is a separate installation from Tecplot 360. When you have Tecplot 360 installed, PyTecplot will need to be installed separately. Because this is a Python module you have to install it as part of your Python installation. A 64-bit installation of Python 2.7 or Python 3.4 and newer is required. All of this information is in our (very thorough) documentation.

PyTecplot Documentation

2. What is Python multiprocessing?

Multiprocessing is a process-based Python “threading” interface. “Threading” is in quotes because it is not actually using multi-threading. It’s actually spawning separate processes. We encourage you to read more in the Python documentation, Python multiprocessing library.

In the Webinar we show you a method to use the Python Multiprocessing Library in conjunction with PyTecplot to accelerate the generation of movies and images. This technique can go beyond just the generation of images. You can extract information from your simulation data as well. The recent Webinar shows you how to use the multiprocessing toolkit in conjunction with PyTecplot. We use a transient simulation of flow around a cylinder as the example, but have timings from several different cases.

The recording and the scripts from the Webinar “Analyze Your Time-Dependent Data 6x Faster” can be found on our website.

Watch the Webinar

3. Is PyTecplot included in the package of Tecplot for CONVERGE?

Request a quote for the full version of Tecplot 360

Last year we partnered with Convergent Science, which makes a CFD code that is used quite heavily in internal combustion, but they also can work with many other application areas. In our partnership if you buy CONVERGE, you get free access to Tecplot for CONVERGE. Tecplot for CONVERGE allows you to use PyTecplot but only through the Tecplot 360 Graphical User Interface.

To have the capability of running PyTecplot in batch mode, as shown in the Webinar, you will need to upgrade to the full version of Tecplot 360.

Request a Quote

4. Does Tecplot 360 run well with other software like Star-CCM+?

Tecplot 360 does not have a direct loader for Star-CCM+. However, you can export from Star-CCM+ to CGNS, Ensight or Tecplot format, all of which can be read by Tecplot 360.

Tecplot 360 Compatible Solvers

5. When running PyTecplot in batch mode, Is session.stop required to clean up the temporary files? Or can you just let the process exit?

Yes and no. We found that on Linux, the multiprocessing toolkit just terminates the process resulting in a core dump. It is very important to call session.stop to avoid these core dump files.

6. What PyTecplot Resources Do You Have?

• Many commonly asked questions are answered in our PyTecplot FAQs.
• Learn more about PyTecplot.
• See all of our PyTecplot Video Tutorials.

The post Python Multiprocessing Accelerates Your CFD Analysis Time appeared first on Tecplot.

Description

Tecplot, Inc. and Convergent Science formed a partnership in June 2018 to distribute (to all users of CONVERGE software) a version of Tecplot 360 called Tecplot for CONVERGE. This blog starts with an introduction by Tiffany Cook, Partner and Public Relations Manager at Convergent Science. Then Scott Fowler, Tecplot 360 Product Manager, will talk briefly about Tecplot products and services. The rest is a tutorial for using Tecplot for CONVERGE.

For the complete transcription, please see our blog Tecplot for CONVERGE Tips and Tricks Tutorial.

Learn more about Tecplot for CONVERGE.

The post Tecplot for CONVERGE Tips and Tricks Tutorial appeared first on Tecplot.

Read the previous blog in this series: Getting Started with PyTecplot Scripting

The post Improving PyTecplot Script Performance appeared first on Tecplot.