Fluid visualization and fluid solvers

Fluid visualization techniques and fluid solvers are widely used in computer graphics and scientific visualization. There is a wide variety of fluid visualization methods. We discuss in detail an important visualization technique known as the Line Integral Convolution (LIC). We perform an experiment to show how the LIC results are affected by the input parameter. We also discuss the nature of the fluid velocity field and provide a brief classification of various fluid visualization techniques.This is followed by fluid solvers, which model the dynamics of the underlying fluid and are used to generate the discrete vector field that represents the velocity of the fluid on a set of sampled physical locations. The Navier-Stokes equations, which model the underlying fluid, are explained. We provide a detailed derivation and explanation of a widely used fluid solver known as the Stable Fluid Solver, developed by Jos Stam. Experiments are performed to demonstrate the method. To convey the motivation behind this work, we also briefly discuss the fluid solver developed by Harlow and Welch, which is based on a mathematical technique known as finite differencing