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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.

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. For a Linux machine, such as the ones at CAVS, Tecplot can be executed with the following commands:

> swsetup tecplot
> tec360

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. 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 *.txt as the files of type, and be sure to 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.

Tec360 automatically plots the first column versus the second column for this case and reads the first two cells as the x-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 it to 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". 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 the duplicated 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.

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, and the 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.

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.

3D Plots

Personal tools

Material Models