Flow visualization in a hypersonic fin/ramp flow

A recent study of a flow detail of an engine intake of future ground to orbit transport systems provided extremely complex data from numerical flow simulation and experimental flow visualization. The data posed a challenging problem to flow visualization, computational flow imaging (CFI), and the comparison of experimental imaging techniques versus computational imaging techniques. Some new visualization techniques have been implemented to provide compact representations of the complex features in the data. It turned out to be most useful to combine various specialized techniques for an icon-like representation of phenomena in a single image in order to study interaction of flow features. Some lessons were learned by simulating experimental visualization techniques on the numerical data.