Scientific visualisations

These scientific visualisations were all produced by EPCC colleagues. If you would like to know more about the process, or are interested in collaborating with us on visualisation work, please contact us at info@epcc.ed.ac.uk.

The video shows monthly averaged sea surface temperatures anomalies in the North Atlantic since 1980. The colours represent warming and cooling up to 2026 compared to the monthly averages from 1980 to 1995. The visualisation highlights the rapid speed at which our oceans have been warming in a period of just over 45 years.

The video was made as realistic as possible with satellite imagery, realistic atmosphere thickness and density, a topography map and the use of ray-traced renders to present the data as realistically and prominently as possible.

The sea surface temperature at the centre of the visualisation is provided in open access by the Copernicus project. Post processing of the data was done using xarray and Iris. The satellite imagery, cloud coverage, topography maps as well as starry sky that form the realistic earth visual were from NASA.

Render, colour grading and editing were done in Blender, an open source 3D visualisation and animation software.

Further information

This video was accepted for SC26 Art of HPC.

The video shows the flow past two wing sails arranged in tandem, representative of wind-assisted propulsion devices. The simulation was performed with x3d2, a high-order finite-difference incompressible-flow solver developed within the Xcompact3d framework. The simulation uses the immersed-boundary method to represent the foil geometry, together with non-periodic streamwise inflow/outflow boundary conditions and periodic transverse boundaries.

The calculation uses a uniform Cartesian mesh of approximately 381 million grid points. Based on the wing-sail chord and imposed inflow velocity, the Reynolds number is approximately 28,000. The case is an illustrative demonstration of the numerical methodology rather than a full-scale wing-sail prediction. Simulations were run in double precision on an NVIDIA Grace Hopper GH200 GPU using x3d2’s CUDA backend.

ParaView was used for the initial post-processing of the CFD simulation's velocity data to compute the Q-criterion, quantity highlighting vortices and showing the turbulent wake. The final video was made using Blender, this includes the ocean simulation, all the environment and elements present in the scene, but also the colour grading and editing of the video. The ship was edited from a base model by RM02 (license CC BY 4.0).

Further information

This video was accepted for SC26 Art of HPC.

Two computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of wind turbine wakes are shown. On the left are two turbines placed directly in line, while the simulation on the right shows the angle of the front turbine "steered" by 24 degrees. This steering redirects the wake generated by the front turbine, impacting the one downstream and increasing the overall power output; in this case a 12% increase is achieved. The video highlights both the large scale of turbine wakes and the potential impact of the wake steering method.

The video was designed and rendered using Blender. For an explanation of the work involved in its creation, see this EPCC News article 'Realistic visualisations of wind turbine flow to be shown at SC24' and the recording of the webinar 'The Science behind the Image Competition - 2'.

Further information

This video was accepted for SC24 Art of HPC and won the best video category of the ARCHER2 Image Competition 2024.

For information about the associated research, see the paper 'Multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimisation of Wind Farm Wake Steering using Wake Models and Large Eddy Simulations'.

This video shows a gprMax simulation modelling the propagation of electromagnetic fields coming from an above ground source into the earth. It models the interactions with the materials the fields come into contact with. The electric field (blue) is emitted at the surface, goes through the ground and interacts with a pair of perpendicular metallic pipes. These simulations enable the modelling of the return signature of subterranean structures and they have a variety of industry applications.

The simulation at the centre of the video uses an underlying grid of 750M cells and was run on eight nodes of the UK National Supercomputer ARCHER2. The data was then pre-processed using ParaView to export vdb files and perform a lossy data compression by discarding data points where the electromagnetic field is negligible. Finally, the scene and all its components were designed and rendered using Blender.

Further information

This video was included in SC25 Art of HPC. It was also placed first in the best video and the best overall image categories of the ARCHER2 image competition 2025.

The visualisation shows a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of Taylor-Green vortices. The Taylor-Green vortex test case is a common set up for benchmarking and validating CFD solvers. The flow is initialised with sin waves velocities. Vortices decay over time showing the different scales of turbulence. The simulation at the centre of the visualisation was performed by ASiMoV-ccs, a CFD and combustion code designed for large scale simulations.

The simulation was run on 16 nodes for 20 hours on ARCHER2. The data was then pre-processed using ParaView to compute the Q-criterion (quantity calculated from the velocity field and highlighting vortices). Finally the scene set up and all its components were designed using Blender.

Further information

This video has been accepted for SC25 Art of HPC and  was submitted to the ARCHER2 image competition 2025.

Lubrication is a complex but important problem; its study can help reduce wear between solid surfaces. Glycerol monooleate (GMO) is known to have impressive lubricating properties. The addition of a small amount of GMO to a lubricant can drastically lower its friction. The GMO molecules gather around small droplets of water forming "reverse-micelles". Under shear, these reverse-micelles get caught on the roughest areas of the solid surface and reduce the resultant friction. 

In this image, which is based on a LAMMPS computation, the water molecules are blue, while the GMO molecules are shown as their atomistic components in black, red and purple. The solvent is hidden for clarity. 

The visualisation was created using Blender, which allows for fine control over camera placement and lighting. This helps highlight important features of the computation while producing a visually pleasing image suitable for non-scientific audiences.

Further information

The associated research is described in this paper: Experimental and simulation study of self-assembly and adsorption of glycerol monooleate in n-dodecane with varying water content onto iron oxide.

This image was submitted for the ARCHER2 image competition 2024.

This video shows a realistic render of the pilot jet flame D from the Sandia set of test cases. The simulation was performed by Chris Goddard (Rolls-Royce) as part of the ASiMoV project (EP/S005072/1) and the visualisation undertaken by Sébastien Lemaire (EPCC) using ParaView, Blender and Blender4science set of tools.

This image shows a fluid dynamics visualisation of a periodic channel flow performed by x3d2, a newly developed high-fidelity CFD solver with CPU and GPU backends. 

A channel flow is a ubiquitous test case for analysing turbulence development and scales. The flow is bounded between two infinitely large planes and all the other directions are periodic, meaning the flow is recirculated once it leaves the computational domain. After an initial perturbation, all the scales of turbulence develop and are visible. In this image we highlight one of the infinitely long planes and the velocity field is displayed.

Further information

This image was accepted for SC25 Art of HPC.