FEView: An interactive visualization tool for finite elements

This paper presents a finite element visualization facility, FEView, which has been implemented based upon an object-oriented graphics library. The visualization tool works as an external module to an interactive program Geomview for viewing and manipulating geometric objects. The graphical user interface has been built on top of the Forms Library, a graphical user interface toolkit for Silicon Graphics workstations.

A finite element mesh can be considered as a collection of faces with edges, wire frame, or point cloud, and the corresponding numerical results gained through finite element analyses can be visualized via color shading and field icons (such as arrows) on the geometric shapes. Also, a scalar field can be represented as a weather map to highlight color shading domains with scalar values falling into the range of interest. Numerical results for two-dimensional cases can be shown with three-dimensional effects by using values of the scalar field. FEView provides animation control over single frame stepping and adjustable speed playing. It has been equipped with geometry operation functionality, in which a particular part of an object can be obtained by specifying material indices, element numbers, and cutting boxes. In local analysis mode, FEView is able to provide local information about finite element objects by picking up the position of interest via mouse manipulation.