MENUControl Style in Tecplot 360
Hi and welcome to a quick tutorial on using Tecplot 360 with Fluent data.
Loading Unsteady Fluent Files
We’re going to look at an example. I’m going to load the data file. These data are in fact a chemical mixer. This is an unsteady solution. We have a moving mesh and so we have CAS and DAP files for each time step. I brought in a representative number of time steps. I didn’t bring all of them, but there’s about 30 plus.
I’m going to select all of them here and I’m going to add to list and that’s just going to add them in here and I can at this point just click open. If I did want to specify options, I just have to click on the advanced options button and hit open. It puts all the information in here. The one thing that we’re going to do is include particle data and you can see that what’s happening down on the status bars, we’re actually reading through and now we have all those data loaded. You can see it’s very fast.
Shade, Mesh and Bounding Box
This is the top of the mixer. I’m going to hide that so we can look inside. I’m going to make this panel of the mixer translucent by say 70% so we can see inside. I’m going to turn off the shade and turn on the Mesh for the other zones as well. I could select all of them at once, but we’ll go ahead and do this one at a time.
Okay, so this is our model. I’m going to turn off the bounding box. The bounding box is just to give me a quick view of the extent of the fluid domain. Next, I’ll go ahead and hide the mesh. This is the part of the mesh that Fluent is using as part of the solution. The mesh is actually changing or moving. If I hit play, you can see that what’s happening is that we’re actually mixing the solution.
Zone Style and Scatter
If we wanted to quickly take a look at the particle information we’re going to go into zone styles and you can see here all the zones of interest. Under scatter, I’m going to turn off the scatter for all but the particles and change the scatter shape to a sphere because that’s the way I want to look at it. And from a color perspective, let’s go ahead and use a pressure, which is the first contour variable.
When you turn on the scatter, you can see there are the pieces of catalyst. In this case it’s a solid catalyst. It’s a heterogeneous solution with a solid catalyst, and if I hit play, you can see those particles moving in time.
Adding a Slice
I’m going to go ahead and turn off the shade here so we can look inside here. What I want to do is I want to look at a slice and perhaps evaluate the different components. So this is a slice where we’re looking at pressure, it’s along the X axis. The Y axis is more appropriate for the solution. I’ll type Y and move the axis to Y.
We implemented an arbitrary slice, so if I hit A, we can actually move it around in the solution to a place that makes sense. I need this slice to be translucent so I can see the mixer behind it. I’ll turn on translucency perhaps 30% is fine. So there’s our slice. We’re going to change the variable that’s shown in the slice. I want to select the concentration of DPM, and now I can use that variable. So concentration of DPM.
Now it looks like there is no DPM at this point. Let’s go in and select perhaps a different one. Well, let’s look at the C2H50H. So we’ll go ahead and look at that. And it looks like that’s also zero. So you can play around quickly with the amount of each one of the species. And so, okay, here’s the phase. So we’ll go ahead and look at that. All right. It doesn’t look like it’s changing all that much, but we haven’t updated it here. Maybe we want to add some additional contour levels, which you can do by selecting … and I think if we hit play, you can see then that it’s mixing. So one of the things that you need to do is go back to that beginning of the solution by hitting play. And so now you can kind of get a sense of the chemical mixing and you can also see the impact of the catalyst.
Load on Demand
Now the first time I go through the play of these data, I’m actually loading in that variable. The second time I go through, it’s going to go very fast because those variables are already loaded into memory. And I’m also going to get rid of the contour legends here by just hitting hide. You can see that very quickly I have a view of the data that might be interesting.
Getting a Second View of the Data with Frames
I want to have a second view of the data, so I want to create a frame. I’m going to hit copy. That’s going to copy this frame and I’ll just use CTRL-v to paste it in a new frame. I’ll then move into tile frames, and I’m going just put them side by side.
Frame Linking
Right now the frames are not linked, so you can see I can move one around and the other one doesn’t move. If I want these to be linked together, I’ll go to frame and go to frame linking and 3D plot, view slice position, and apply that to all frames. Now when I rotate one, it rotates both. To rotate, you just hit control, right click. That’ll actually rotate, right click will translate, the middle mouse button will zoom in and out. Just little tricks of the trade if you’re unaware.
Changing Slice Planes
If I wanted to change the slice to a Z slice, I can just hit … get in the slice tool, hit Z, and it’ll move into a Z slice. And you can see that it updated automatically. In this frame, I want to look at the Y velocity. I don’t have to use the same variable with the two frames. I’m going to move this slice down so it’s sitting right on top of the blades so that we can see this a little better.So now you can kind of see where that’s changing.
Creating a Time-Series Plot
If I want to understand how pressure might be changing or the concentration might be changing as a function of time, I can quickly go to probe and create time series plot. And then I’m going to select a point on the slice here. And what’s going to happen is you’ll see that it’s actually going through each of the time steps and it’s going to extract the value of a what’s shown on the slice at that point. This will take a few seconds. There’s 73 time steps, so it should be going through pretty quickly. And the idea here is that I can create a probe or a plot of a particular value over time.
So the first time it goes through, it has to load the information necessary to create that point. So depending on the size of your data, this operation could take anywhere from one minute to 10 minutes. kay, it looks like it’s done.
Now what you see is a series of values as a function of time. We are looking at pressure as a function of time. If we hit play we can actually see how pressure is changing all the way through the extent of the data. This is quick way of interrogating a particular value.
Adjusting Your Plot Layout
If I click on a different point, it will go through, now that the data is loaded it should be a lot faster, and it will actually pull out that pressure profile. We can then visually look at the variance between the two examples. Depending on the type of data you have, if you’re looking at unsteady results, this is certainly a convenient way to evaluate them.
Once I’m done, I may want to modify the plot layout, moving this frame up and making these frames a little smaller, to create a collage of sorts. This is my final image or final layout that I want to print or publish. And now I’m going to show you how quickly you can do that.
Exporting Your Plot
There are a couple of things I want to show you. On a particular frame, if I right click on the frame itself, I can copy this and bring it into an application like PowerPoint or word and just paste it in. If I wanted to save this as an image, I just go to file, export, and under export I would select like a PNG for all frames and I could save this out as well. I can also enter in a width, say if I wanted it to be high resolution, say 2,500 and use anti-aliasing. I’ll just put it on the desktop and call it untitled two and hit save.
So that’s how you use Tecplot 360 with Fluent data. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to email at us. Email us at support@tecplot.com. Thanks again for watching.