Interactive simulation and visualization of massless, massed, and evaporating particles

Most software packages available for particle tracing focus on visualizing steady or unsteady vector fields by using massless particle trajectories. For many applications, however, the use of massed and evaporating particles would provide a model of physical processes that could be used in product testing or design. In this article we describe the TrackPack toolkit, which provides an integrated interface for computing massless, massed, and evaporating particle trajectories in steady flow. In all cases, we assume a noncoupled model and compute particle trajectories through an existing vector field by numerically integrating with forward Euler, fourth-order Runge–Kutta, or an analytic streamline calculation. The TrackPack software effort was motivated by an industrial application to model pollution control systems in industrial boilers. We briefly describe the project and the visualization environment, and we demonstrate the necessity for massed, evaporating models in the application.