2Line Plotting
32D Surface Plots
43D Plots

November 2017 Update: LaTeX Fonts are available in Tecplot 360 2017 Release 3 and later. This gives you the ability to use your installed version of LaTeX to display complex formulae and equations directly on your plots. We test against MiKTeX and TeXLive but should be compatible with other LaTeX engines. Watch the LaTeX video tutorial Problem: Some variable names in my data file include one.

Introduction

The ParaView Tutorial is an introductory and comprehensive tutorial. It teaches using ParaView through examples that start at basic usage and continue through more advanced topics such as temporal analysis, animation, parallel processing, and scripting. Get started with Tecplot 360 while learning best practices for plotting and analyzing your data. This 30-minute Webinar walks you through everything from loa.

Tecplot 360 is a powerful visualization tool with the capability of line plotting, 2D and 3D surface plots, and 3D volumetric visualization.The data loader for Tecplot can read a variety of different files such as, HDF, HDF5, Excel, FEA files, and a general text loader.This tutorial will go through the process of generating plots using some of the previously mentioned file types and plot types.

Has anyone any idea that why the value of 'shock' variable in Tecplot can be greater than 1 or less than -1? I tried to capture a shock interface in a 2D convergent-divergent nozzle. Although the position is deriable, but the lengend given in Tecplot has a value which can be as high as 30 and as low as -30. According to the definition. The data used for this 3D plots tutorials is from MDDPPostProcessing, a homework assignment for the ICME class. This assignment page gives a walk through for using Tecplot for the assignment. This tutorial will show examples on how to visualize 3D data. First, the files are moved to the Tecplot working directory.

The user's manual can be found at http://www.tecplot.com/support/documentation/

For a Windows machine, Tecplot is started my simply running the executable. Rhinestone design program. For a Linux machine, such as the ones at CAVS, Tecplot can be executed with the following commands:

Line Plotting

The Tec360 user's manual has a complete list of functionality for the line plots. Only a few of these capabilities will be shown here.

Loading a text (.txt) file

For a general text file, the visualization is pretty straight forward. This is similar to the MDDP post-processing shown here (MDDP).In this example, stress-strain data of a tension simulation was output to a text file (stress-strain.txt).After starting Tec360, the welcome screen shown below appears shown in Figure 1,

Figure 1. Tec360 welcome screen.

To open the text file, go to --> File --> Load Data File, and the data file loader box appears.Next, navigate to the directory of the file, (i.e. /scratch/dhj21/tec360), select text spreadsheet load as the files of type, select *.txt as the files of type, and be sureto check the advanced option. The advanced option allows the specification of the type of spacing for the text file. For this text file,tab spacing was used. This is shown by Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2. Tec360 data file loader
Figure 3. Tec360 advanced options for text loader.

Tec360 automatically plots the first column versus the second column for this case and reads the first two cells as thex-axis and y-axis respectively. This is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Stress-strain curve from a text file.

Plot customization

Tec360 offers a variety of plot customizations. To increase the thickness of the line, click 'Mapping Style..' in the plot toolbar, under the lines tab right-click '0.02%' to change itto the desired value (0.4% for this case). The color, line pattern, and pattern length can all be edited here.Next, to add a border on the top and right sides of the plot area, --> Plot --> Axis --> Line and check show grid border.You can manually edit the grid labels under the 'Title Tab'. For example, the True Stress y-axis label does not have units. This can be manually changed by,--> Plot --> Axis --> Title --> clicking on the 'Y1' axis --> Use text --> 'True Stress MPa'. The same process was done to add (mm/mm) to the True Strain axis. Figure 5 shows the current plot.

Figure 5. Modified stress-strain plot .

After, the plot is customized to the desired layout, the layout can be saved by --> File --> Save layout. Now, another text file can be appended to the current file by following the earlier steps for importing data. -->File -->Load data file --> Load 'stress-strain_2.txt' --> Advanced options. A dialog will pop up asking for cancel, append, or replace.After clicking append, the new data is added, but not displayed. In order to display the new data, -->Plot --> Mapping Style --> Create Map. In the create Mappings dialog box, select X-variable versus Y-variable for all linear zones. Then, deselect theduplicated first curve and change the second curves weight to match the first one as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Two stress-strain plots .

2D Surface Plots

Loading HDF5 Files

After starting Tec360, select load data files. Then under file type select 'HDF5 Loader (.h5)'. Then click open then select the file. This process is shown in Figures 7-9.

Figure 7.
Figure 8.
Figure 9.

Surface plot visualization

After the data has been loaded, this make take some time for large files, you can visualize the data. For this example, a Newtonian fluid is flowing in a rectangular duct, andthe velocity profile in the x-direction is being visualized. By checking slice, a 2 dimensional planar slice is placed in the domain and shows the velocity profile as shown in Figure 10.

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Figure 10. Planar slice showing the velocity in the x-direction.

You can change the slice placement, orientation, and other features under --> Plots --> Slices. There is much customization available now and is thoroughly explained in Chapter 14 of the user's manual.

Probing the visualized data

The data can be visualized in Tecplot in a spreadsheet form by: --> Data --> Spreadsheet. After selecting the desired variable and plane, a two-dimensional table is displayed. The plane can be changedby changing the plane in the plane tab. For this example, the velocity that needed to be know was the velocity at the middle point as shown in Figure 11 (5.58E-7).

Figure 11. Spreadsheet form for the HDF5 file.

This value can also be probed if the i,j,k point is known by: --> Data --> Probe At. After specifying either the x,y,z position or the i,j,k index, -->Do Probe as shown in Figures 12 and 13. Note: the mousecan also be used to click on a desired point.

Figure 12. Probing a value at a certain point.

Figure 13. Probing a value at a certain point.

3D Plots

Dislocation Dynamics Example

The data used for this 3D plots tutorials is from MDDP_Post_Processing, a homework assignment for the ICME class. This assignment pagegives a walk through for using Tecplot for the assignment. This tutorial will show examples on how to visualize 3D data.

First, the files are moved to the Tecplot working directory. For this example, 7 files (tech002, tech004, .. tech014) are all loaded togetherby --> File --> Load Data File(s) --> Selecting Tecplot Data Loader as the Files of type --> Typing tec* in the file name --> Selecting all files --> Open.This is shown in Figure 14. Note: This make take a lot time if there are a lot of time steps present.

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Figure 14. Selecting all files for data loader to load.

The default plot type is XY line, so this need to be changed to 3D Cartesian by clicking XY Line and changing it to 3D Cartesian. The first thing to dois to make sure the X,Y,Z data points correspond to the input position data --> Plot --> Assign XYZ and making sure X, Y, and Z correspond to the correct data.Then to make the axes appear --> Plot --> Axis, select show axis for the X,Y, and Z axes. Be sure

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