GIS and Remote Sensing in Hydrology, Water Resources and Environment (Proceedings of ICGRHWE held at the Three Gorges Dam, China, September 2003). IAHS Publ. 289, 2004, 269-275

Abstract One of the most important ways of visualizing fluid flows is the construction of streamlines, which are lines that are everywhere tangential to the local velocity field. We have created mass conservative streamline tracking methods for two-dimensional (2-D) and 3-D CFD velocity fields. It has been shown that mass conservation is a key issue for accurate streamline construction. This paper presents the conditions of a scalar function such that the product of the scalar function and a linearly interpolated 2-D CFD velocity field for incompressible flows satisfies the law of mass conservation first and then simplifies the existing streamline tracking method.

Key words computational fluid dynamics (CFD); mass conservation; streamline