This animation, created by Caedium Professional, shows a transient multiphase CFD simulation of water filling a tank that is initially filled with air. The free surface is shown as blue for the air-side surface and red for the water-side surface. Each frame of the animation was automatically rendered by POV-Ray (a ray-tracer) through Caedium.

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Multi-Block Topology

For such a simple geometry it is worth the extra effort to produce a multi-block hexahedra mesh. This means constraining the geometry during construction to be volumes with 6 faces. Once complete the multiple volumes can then be connected at common faces to form a continuous flow domain.

Multi-Block Topology

Hexahedra Mesh

With a constrained multi-block topology the meshing can then produce hexahedra cells. Typically hexahedra are more accurate for CFD simulations compared to other element shapes.

Multi-Block Hexahedra Mesh

Movie Making

Rather than post process a huge amount of flow data (there were 600 frames in the movie) after the simulation was finished to create the movie, Caedium simultaneously initiated each frame render in POV-Ray while the simulation was running.

POV-Ray Frame

For comparison a native (non-ray traced) render of the same frame is shown below:

Native OpenGL Frame

More

Checkout Caedium tutorials on:

• Multi-block topology construction at "Water Tank"
• Movie creation for a tank filling simulation at "Transient Water and Air Flow in a Tank"

See "POV-Ray" for instructions on using it to render movie frames in Caedium.