A uniform intermediate model for high-fidelity and efficient visualisation of multidisciplinary heterogeneous simulation data

Simulation-driven design has become an effective methodology for improving the design process in terms of both time and cost. The high-fidelity and efficient visualisation of multidisciplinary simulation results of complex products is crucial for helping designers improve their design. One of the key challenges is to display and view multidisciplinary simulation results that are heterogeneous and tool-specific. In this study, a uniform intermediate model which supports high-fidelity and efficient visualisation of multidisciplinary heterogeneous simulation data is proposed and developed. Firstly, the problem of generating a uniform intermediate mesh model is formalised and represented as an optimisation problem. Then, the genetic algorithm is employed and improved to optimise the uniform intermediate mesh model globally and locally after the direct initial (D-initial) mesh model is refined based on the hybrid mesh size field. Finally, the mapping and interpolation relationships between the uniform intermediate mesh model and the simulation mesh models of different disciplines are established to implement simulation results visualisation in a CAD platform. To improve computational efficiency, two strategies are deliberately employed, namely indexing and parallel computing. Several experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.