Visualisation and data representation for large scale multibody simulations with detailed contact analysis: A case study

An integrated visualisation and simulation tool for multibody systems with detailed contact analysis applied to transient dynamics is presented in this case study. Transient multibody simulations focusing on detailed contact analysis put high demands not only on the calculation part but also on data visualisation. This is especially true for multidimensional time-varying data. Typical simulation output data, produced by the simulation tool used for this work, has a large number of time steps, in the order of 103–106. This results in 500 MB to 8 GB of compressed data.The large amount of data and many time steps require data compression. A compression algorithm specially designed for time-varying data is used. Selective data access is required for visualisation of transient data sets. A block based streaming technique with fast selective data access is presented that allows for realistic animations of mechanical system dynamics. Furthermore, different representations of surfaces and surface related data are presented that are used throughout the visualisation process.One contribution of this work is the summarisation and description of the complete visualisation process that includes everything from data storage to image rendering, and also includes user-to-data interaction. Another contribution is a sparse data structure for storage of two dimensional transient data sets.This work has been initiated to investigate and describe what is needed to create a complete multibody visualisation system. The outcome of this work is a full-scale visualisation system that is used daily in the industry.