On-The-Fly Tracking of Flame Surfaces for the Visual Analysis of Combustion Processes

The visual analysis of combustion processes is one of the challenges of modern flow visualization. In turbulent combustion research, the behaviour of the flame surface contains important information about the interactions between turbulence and chemistry. The extraction and tracking of this surface is crucial for understanding combustion processes. This is impossible to realize as a post-process because of the size of the involved datasets, which are too large to be stored on disk. We present an on-the-fly method for tracking the flame surface directly during simulation and computing the local tangential surface deformation for arbitrary time intervals. In a massively parallel simulation, the data are distributed over many processes and only a single time step is in memory at any time. To satisfy the demands on parallelism and accuracy posed by this situation, we track the surface with independent micro-patches and adapt their distribution as needed to maintain numerical stability. With our method, we enable combustion researchers to observe the detailed movement and deformation of the flame surface over extended periods of time and thus gain novel insights into the mechanisms of turbulence-chemistry interactions. We validate our method on analytic ground truth data and show its applicability on two real-world simulations.