Hi Shi,

Saving such amounts of data in ascii format is not going to be efficient. We just accepted this fact, otherwise we should go to binary formats.

In our group we have discrete particle simulations, and we export vtk files (xml format -- an unstructured grid to be precise) that contains all the particle data. I have included an example of such a file below. You write the point positions of the particles first, followed by data concerning the movement of the particle, the diameter and other stuff like rotation, temperature, etc... I don't see what you mean by redundant data. When you load this file into Paraview choose the glyph option, choose 'sphere', set 'radius' to 1 (it is initially set to 0.5), scale mode to 'scalar' and scale factor to 1. You can then draw the particles. You can color them by velocity, temperature, rotation or whatever you included in the file, or you can choose to show arrows (another glyph) to display the particle movement. For the flow field, which is calculated on a structured grid, you can use another file format, e.g. rectilinear grid. In all cases the kitware/vtk file formats documentation is going to be useful.

Regards,
Ivo Roghair

PhD student at Fundamentals of Chemical Reaction Engineering
University of Twente, The Netherlands

------------------ BEGIN EXAMPLE FILE ---------------------
<VTKFile type="UnstructuredGrid" version="0.1" byte_order="LittleEndian">
 <UnstructuredGrid>
   <Piece NumberOfPoints="3" NumberOfCells="0">
     <Points>
<DataArray name="Position" type="Float32" NumberOfComponents="3" format="ascii">
       0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1
       </DataArray>
     </Points>
     <PointData  Vectors="vector">
<DataArray type="Float32" Name="Velocity" NumberOfComponents="3" format="ascii">
       4 4 4 4 0 0 2 2 -2
       </DataArray>
   <DataArray type="Float32" Name="Diameter" format="ascii">
       0.1 0.5 1
       </DataArray>
   <DataArray type="Float32" Name="Temperature" format="ascii">
       273 300 350
       </DataArray>
     </PointData>
     <Cells>
       <DataArray type="Int32" Name="connectivity" format="ascii">
       </DataArray>
       <DataArray type="Int32" Name="offsets" format="ascii">
       </DataArray>
       <DataArray type="UInt8" Name="types" format="ascii">
       </DataArray>
     </Cells>
   </Piece>
 </UnstructuredGrid>
</VTKFile>
---------- END EXAMPLE FILE --------------

Shi Jin wrote:
Hi there,

I am doing a simulation of fluid-particle interactions, in which I generate a 
lot of data for particles. I am looking for the efficient file format to store 
my particle information for visualization with paraview. For example, is there 
a file format that allows me to store all the particle information at a given 
time in a single ascii file, which looks like
#1-id 2-radius 3-rho_p 4-fixed 5-x 6-y 7-z 8-u 9-v 10-z 11-w1 12-w2 13-w3 
14-alpha 15-theta 17-phi
0 0.500000 1.200000 0 2.077176 2.678227 8.649375 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
1 0.500000 0.800 0 2.728281 0.873571 6.806029 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
...

I guess for the purpuse of visualization, we need radius, rho_p(for color), x,y and z at least. The rotation information would be nice to have but is considered optional at this stage.
I am thinking to save different time results in different files to make the 
loading efficient in terms of memory since I have a lot of particles here. Then 
we can produce animation using time control. I guess we could use VTK formats 
but that has lots of redundant information.

I saw some very early discussion on a similar topic in the forum but didn't get 
the conclusive answer. I would appreciate some advice for the current version 
of paraview.

Thank you very much.

 --
Shi Jin, PhD



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