Volume rendering of smoke propagation CFD data

The evacuation of buildings in the event of a fire requires careful planning of ventilation and evacuation routes during early architectural design stages. Different designs are evaluated by simulating smoke propagation using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Visibility plays a decisive role in finding the nearest fire exit. This paper presents real-time volume rendering of transient smoke propagation conforming to standardized visibility distances. We visualize time dependent smoke particle concentration on unstructured tetrahedral meshes using a direct volume rendering approach. Due to the linear transfer function of the optical model commonly used in fire protection engineering, accurate pre-integration of diffuse color across tetrahedra can be carried out with a single 2D texture lookup. We reduce rounding errors during framebuffer blending by applying randomized dithering if high accuracy frame buffers are unavailable on the target platform. A simple absorption-based light...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: VISUALIZATION
• Authors: Oliver Staubli, Christian Sigg, Ronald Peikert, Markus H. Gross, Daniel Gubler
• Keywords: Rendering Approach, Smoke Propagation, Visualization, VISUALIZATION 2005, Volume Rendering