Direct Surface Extraction from Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulation Data

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics is a completely mesh-free method to simulate fluid flow. Rather than representing the physical variables on a fixed grid, the fluid is represented by freely moving interpolation centers (”particles”). Apart from their position and velocity these particles carry information about the physical quantities of the considered fluid, such as temperature, composition, chemical potentials etc. Being completely Lagrangian and following the motion of the flow, these particles represent an unstructured data set at each point in time, i.e. the particles do not exhibit a spatial arrangement nor a fixed connectivity. To visualize the simulated particle data at a certain point in time, we propose a method that extracts surfaces segmenting the domain of the particles with respect to some scalar field. For scalar volume data, isosurface extraction is a standard visualization method and has been subject to research for decades. We propose a method that directly extracts surfaces from smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation data without 3D mesh generation or