There are three basic physical visual properties that appear repeatedly in the study of engineering and scientific problems: the visualization of scalar, vector, and acceleration information. They represent y, dy/dt, dy^2/dt^2. In this study temperature distribution relates scaler information and heatflux to vector information. The annotated graphs are presented in the order of "judged to be the best" to "left room to be improved."
1. The choice of icon : trangle over arrow
(observation 1).
2. Size of the icon imparts more information than color.
(observation 2).
3. The color of the icon introduces a third dimension.
(observation 3).
4. There is a threshold in the density of data points.
(observation 4).
5. Combining scalar and vector presentation to improve visual perception.
(observation 5).
Casual information can be quickly derived from observation 3 : red and large triangle denotes high heat flux, i.e., convective heat, is highly visible; blue and the small triangles denote low heat flux hence low visibilty.
Non-casual information can be derived from the intermediate heat flux zone with greenish medium sized traingles at the lower left portion of the chart. The system is losing heat flux from the left side (thermal syphon) . Convection forces the fluid to sink along the left wall and causes a mild slushing effect at the bottom of the container. Although a laminar mathematical model is assumed in the computation, the presence of this slushing zone raises suspect to this assumption. This suspect can be visualized in this chart but is otherwise difficult to detect from the raw data or other engineering drawings. The phenomon can be seen in both figure 2 and figure 4 but is most prominent in figure 3.
