A Topological Framework for the Interactive Exploration of Large Scale Turbulent Combustion

The advent of highly accurate, large scale volumetric simulations has made data analysis and visualization techniques an integral part of the modern scientific process. To develop new insights from raw data, scientists need the ability to define features of interest in a flexible manner and to understand how changes in the feature definition impact the subsequent analysis of the data. Therefore, simply exploring the raw data is not sufficient. This paper presents a new topological framework for the analysis of large scale, time-varying, turbulent combustion simulations. It allows the scientists to interactively explore the complete parameter space of fuel consumption thresholds for an entire time-dependent combustion simulation. By computing augmented merge trees and their corresponding data segmentations, the system allows the user complete flexibility to segment, select, and track burning cells through time thanks to a linked view interface. We developed this technique in the context of low-swirl turbulent pre-mixed same simulation analysis, where the topological abstractions enable an efficient tracking through time of the burning cells and provide new qualitative and quantitative insights into the dynamics of the combustion process.