ParticleVis is a visualization tool specialized for loading and exploring particulate simulation data. It contains a set of features that enables powerful and useful visualizations of particle simulations to be quickly generated. Support is provided for visualization of hundreds of thousands of particles on commodity workstations, using OpenGL. Functionality includes data exploration, debugging of simulation output, and generation of presentation-quality imagery.

The ability to visualize vector flow information in a variety of forms, such as arrow-lines, inscribed glyphs, and motion blurred particles, is particularly useful in the study of granular flows. User-generated information can be integrated into the visualization using features such as per-particle color maps and surface maps, per-region vector fields, and volumetric data.

This download software is a compressed zipped file containing a Windows executable program which can be used to interactively visualize the state file produced by any of the three pharmaHUB DEM Modeling tools: Hopper Flow Discharge, High Speed Mixer, and Rotating Drum. State files generated by these tools through pharmaHUB execution can be downloaded to your machine using the tool output interface. You can then visualize and animate them using the ParticleVis executable.

After downloading and unzipping the ParticleVis file, you can go to the PVis1.0 folder and click on ParticleVis, the Particle Visualization Application, to start the program. Any downloaded DEM state file can be loaded for interactive visualization and animation. Template geometry XML files for the three DEM tools can be found in the PVis1.0/xml directory.

See the ParticleVis Web Site to download the source code.

Professor Carl Wassgren
Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University
Vince Hoon
Computer Science, Purdue University

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Carl Wassgren; Avik Sarkar (2008), "ParticleVis: A Tool for DEM Particle Visualization ," https://pharmahub.org/resources/41.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. Discrete element model (DEM)
2. Particle-based computations
3. Visualization