Automated Extraction of Flow Features NASA

The use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has become standard practice in the design and development of the major components used for air and space propulsion. To aid in the post-processing and analysis of CFD results, many researchers now use automated feature extraction utilities. These tools can be applied in order to detect the existence of such features as shocks, vortex cores and separatiodreattachment lines. The existence of secondary flow is another feature of significant importance to CFD engineers because it highlights regions of increased losses. Although secondary flow is relatively well understood there is no commonly accepted mathematical description of it. This paper will present a definition for secondary flow and one approach for automatic detection and visualization of this feature.