A uniform intermediate model for high-fidelity and efficient visualisation of multidisciplinary heterogeneous simulation data

Simulation-driven design has become an effective methodology for improving the design process, in terms of both time and cost. Visualization of simulation results with high efficiency and fidelity is of significant importance for this methodology especially for the multidisciplinary simulation of complex products. One of the key challenges is to display and view multidisciplinary simulation results that are heterogeneous and tool-specific. In this research, a uniform intermediate model which supports high-fidelity and efficient visualization of multidisciplinary heterogeneous simulation data is proposed and developed. Firstly, the problem of generating a uniform intermediate mesh model is formalized and represented as an optimization model. Then, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is employed and improved to optimize the uniform intermediate mesh model globally and locally after the direct initial (D-initial) mesh model is refined based on the hybrid mesh size field. Finally, the mapping and interpolation relationships between the uniform intermediate mesh model and the mesh models from different disciplines are established to implement simulation results visualization in a CAD platform. To improve computational efficiency, two strategies are deliberately specifically employed, namely indexing and parallel computing. Several experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.