Visual Analysis and Detection of Contrails in Aircraft Engine Simulations

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 29; no. 1; pp. 798 - 808
• Main Authors: Nipu, Nafiul, Floricel, Carla, Naghashzadeh, Negar, Paoli, Roberto, Marai, G. Elisabeta
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.01.2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Aircraft detection; Aircraft engines; Aircraft propulsion; Analytical models; Atmospheric modeling; Clustering; Computation; Computational modeling; Contrails; Data models; Data visualization; Feature Detection; Mathematics; Parameters; Physical & Environmental Sciences; Scalar Field Data; Simulation; Tracking & Transformation; Visualization
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3209356

Contrails are condensation trails generated from emitted particles by aircraft engines, which perturb Earth's radiation budget. Simulation modeling is used to interpret the formation and development of contrails. These simulations are computationally intensive and rely on high-performance computing solutions, and the contrail structures are not well defined. We propose a visual computing system to assist in defining contrails and their characteristics, as well as in the analysis of parameters for computer-generated aircraft engine simulations. The back-end of our system leverages a contrail-formation criterion and clustering methods to detect contrails' shape and evolution and identify similar simulation runs. The front-end system helps analyze contrails and their parameters across multiple simulation runs. The evaluation with domain experts shows this approach successfully aids in contrail data investigation.