Adjoint-enhanced flow visualization

This work presents a novel method of visually capturing the relative importance of different flow regions with respect to a quantity of interest. Existing flow visualization techniques are enhanced to convey flow importance. This is accomplished by filtering their output with additional information obtained from the adjoint counterpart of the physical flow field. The additional adjoint data is of equal resolution to the physical flow field. The adjoint flow data links physical fluid regions to user chosen quantities of interest. Thus, regions that are less relevant to the quantity of interest can be masked or deemphasized to reduce clutter and to highlight the behavior of the more important flow regions. The concept is demonstrated on a series of fluid simulations. The visualizations highlight the temporally changing importance of flow features, regions of influence in complex flows, and occlusion reduction in 3D flows. The method is also demonstrated by checking the impact of perturbations introduced in flow regions that were found to be both important and unimportant based on the adjoint data.