Visualization of flow past a marine turbine: the information-assisted search for sustainable energy

Interest in renewable, green, and sustainable energy has risen sharply in recent years. The use of marine turbines to extract kinetic energy from the tidal current is gaining popularity. CFD modeling is carried out to investigate the surrounding flow behavior and thus develop effective marine turbine systems. However, visualizing the simulation results remains a challenging task for engineers. In this paper, we develop, explore and present customized visualization techniques in order to help engineers gain a fast overview and intuitive insight into the flow past the marine turbine. The system exploits multiple-coordinated information-assisted views of the CFD simulation data. Our application consists of a tabular histogram, velocity histogram, parallel coordinate plot, streamline plot and spatial views. Information-based streamline seeding is used to investigate the behavior of the flow deemed interesting to the engineer. Specialized, application-specific information based on swirling flow is derived and visualized in order to evaluate turbine blade design. To demonstrate the usage of our system, a selection of specialized case scenarios designed to answer the core questions brought out by engineers is described. We also report feedback on our system from CFD experts researching marine turbine simulations.