AcuFieldView Tutorials

The following topics are designed to give both the new as well as the experienced AcuFieldView users a detailed look at some of the abilities of the product. In each tutorial, you will be guided through a series of steps to visualize the results from the given data set. Each tutorial covers a different application or industry. Visualizations have been created and calculations have been performed that might be useful for an individual in that discipline. It is not expected nor required that you work through all of the tutorials to learn AcuFieldView. More experienced AcuFieldView users may want to browse through the tutorial topics to learn new visualization techniques.

Prerequisites

The tutorials have been written with the assumptions that you are familiar with components of AcuSolve, especially AcuConsole and AcuTrans. It is also assumed that you have become familiar with the AcuFieldView interface and basic operations. In general, it is expected that you understand the following basics:

How to find the data readers in the File menu and open the desired reader panel for data input.
How to open the visualization panels either from the Side toolbar or the Visualization Panels menu to create and modify surfaces and rakes in AcuFieldView.
How to change scalar, vector and threshold functions for surfaces and rakes directly on their respective visualization panels, and/or open the Function Specification panel to "load-up" different functions in the function registers (iso-surface, scalar, vector and threshold).
How to change the geom (geometry) color and color maps used to color surfaces on the Scalar Colormap Specification panel.
How to move the data around the modeling window using mouse actions to translate, rotate and zoom in to the data.

Tutorial Data

The tutorial data is installed by default with the AcuSolve software. All of the files required for each tutorial can be found in separate directories in <AcuSolve installation directory>\model_files\tutorials\AcuFieldView\AFV_tutorial_inputs.zip. This zip file expands to contain subdirectories named for each of the tutorials. The tutorials are listed in the table below.

Tutorial Name	Notes
/biomedical	Internal flow in a complex manifold device, illustration of how to calculate a species mass balance, how to perform dataset mirroring.
/polymer_mixing	Flow of a non-Newtonian fluid in a Kenics mixer, highlighting extensive use of function calculator. FVX keyframe. Illustration accompanies example.
/vortexshedding	Transient flow around a cylinder, with description of streakline calculation. FVX keyframe. Illustration accompanies example.

Working Through the Tutorials

It is assumed that you have read the topics mentioned in the prerequisites section above before you run the tutorials. The tutorials have been written as explicitly as possible. If a step requires actions that have been performed in previous steps, the instructions may be less explicit than in the first instance.

Note: Tutorials are documented with visualization images using white backgrounds and black text. However, the default background color in AcuFieldView is black. If you want to recreate the images in this document, then change your background color to white as soon as you start on a tutorial. To change your background color, click View > Background Color. Select white and click Close.

It is strongly recommended that you save a complete restart after each page of a given tutorial so that you can easily revert to the state at an earlier step. A complete restart is a set of files containing information about the current state of AcuFieldView. It saves information about the data file read in and any surfaces/rakes that have been created as well as their attributes. Restarts can be created at any time, of course, but one complete restart for each step will assure its availability later.

Note: The tutorials were each designed to be run from a fully set up AcuConsole database (.acs) or from a set of results that are provided. After running AcuSolve, you will start AcuFieldView and work through the remainder of a given tutorial. If other data has been loaded into AcuFieldView and visualizations have been performed, or if other tutorials have been worked before starting a given tutorial (without restarting AcuFieldView), then panels may exist in states different than that described in the instructions. If you are just starting with AcuFieldView, it is recommended that you restart the program for each tutorial to avoid confusion.