Data optimisation for visualisation of FEM-data

The amount of data produced by a finite element calculation places a particular challenge to scientific visualisation, specifically in the field of tunnelling, because to describe the very complicated properties of the rock-mass with a finite element mesh, this mesh must have a very fine grid. This effects a large number of elements and for each of them simulation results are calculated. If the tunnel advance is simulated a large number of loadsteps are calculated, which also increases the amount of data, so result files can reach a size of hundreds of megabytes. Because of decreasing hardware costs the storage of these data is no longer a real problem, but for the visualisation in real-time techniques are necessary to reduce this amount of data without loosing any information. In this paper methods are presented to extract the parts of the FEM-output-data that are necessary for the visualisation of the simulation results. There are two major parts which have to be considered: the geometry and the simulation data. In both the requirements for simulation and visualisation are different. The techniques described fulfil the requirements of scientific information visualisation