Visualizing Overlapping Space-Time Regions of Time-Series 2D Experimental Data and 3D Simulation Data: Application to Plasma-Plume Collisions

It is of critical importance in many physics fields to compare results both from simulation and experiments. In order to make this comparison efficient, visualization of experimental and simulation data is rather essential. In this paper, we focus on the colliding plasma plumes using laser produced plasmas to understand the basic physics in a nuclear laser fusion reactor. To visually compare dynamical data acquired through experiments and simulations, we propose a visualization method to highlight overlapping space-time regions of XYT-space volumes. The visualization of the XYT-space volumes is conducted based on particle-based techniques. First, input data for an experiment and a simulation are both converted into the XYT-space volumes and then further converted into particle data. Second, we perform the particle-based volume fusion. Third, we conduct the particle-based evaluation of the degrees of overlapping and highlight highly overlapping regions using colors with large whiteness. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by applying it to the plasma plume collision of tungsten. Our method has visually proven that the univalent ionized plasma is the most dominant plasma in the experiment.