Ploting 3D flow data (4D plot)

Hi,

I will be doing CFD calculations with MATLAB in 3D. I have x,y,z coordinates and Temperature in each point. Assume I have 100 points in each direction I have 100*100*100 temperature points. I want to plot temperature (also make a movie) using color as the temperature intensity. Is there an easy way of doing it? I am not sure if scatter3 will work for me or not. ( I want to know if I need to invest time to learn paraview)

Thank you.

[Walter Roberson]

What is your display resolution? Although in theory 100*100*100 has the same number of pixels as a 1000 x 1000 display, in practice the projection angle is going to require a lot of those voxels to be visually on top of one another.

How far "into" the cube needs to be visible from the outside?

Answer 1

[Ahmed A. Selman]

Logically, no 4-D plot can be made sensible to us (unfortunately, we are stuck to see and understand 3-D world, only). So even if you could plot it somehow, understanding it will be quite tricky. Yet, fortunately this time, we can imagine n-D world theoretically (with n = 0 to inf).

Now, suppose your data set is something like D(x,y,z,T). At each point of (x,y,z) space, there is a (T) value that changes the behavior. So you want to visualize the (x,y,z) space at a given (T). Thus, the answer is (fix one coordinate, and change the other 3). The rest is how to do it.

When I needed it, I used to fix z-coordinate and plot (x,y) horizontally, with (T) in the vertical axis, as in the example below:

    clc
    clear 
    close all
    for x=1:20;
        for y=1:20;
            for z=1:20
                for T=1:20
                    D(x,y,z,T)=sin((T.*x.*z)*0.1); % creating 4-D array
                end
            end
        end
    end
    [nio, njo, nko, nTo]=size(D);
    surfl(D(:,:,1)); % Initial snapshot

     for k=1:nTo; % fixing the z-coordinates 
         surfl(D(:,:,k))
         xlabel(' X - Axis');
         ylabel(' Y - Axis');
         zlabel(' T - Axis');
         title({' Z is fixed at: '   k    })
         pause (0.1);
         CF(k)=getframe;
     end 
     figure;  
     movie(CF); % This is the movie of the frames just displayed.

Please modify it to your own convenience, this is NOT the code you exactly need, but the method is, I think.

Answer 2

[Omid Adljuy]

Probably the isosurface command is what you're looking for.

See MATLAB Help for more details and examples.