Post-Processing via 3rd-Party Solution

The workflow on the SimScale platform is kept as modular and as open as possible, allowing you to use a third-party post-processing platform, such as ParaView, to analyze the results. Find below a brief tutorial on how this is done.

How to Post-Process via a Local ParaView?

As soon as your simulation run is finished, the result set is ready for post-processing within SimScale. At this point, it is also possible to download the results for further post-processing via third-party software.

Here you will see a brief tutorial on how to use ParaView for post-processing results generated on the SimScale platform. ParaView is an open-source visualization application, provided by Kitware, that you can download and run on many different platforms. In case you don’t have ParaView on your computer, you can download it on this page.

The steps for visualizing the results of the SimScale platform in ParaView are explained below:

Download the Results

As soon as the simulation finishes running, there will be a button to download the results. By hovering the mouse over the download icon, you can see the size of the result file:

Downloading results for local post-processing from the Run panel — Figure 1: Downloading results for local post-processing from the *Run* panel

Results can also be downloaded from the Filter ribbon inside the post-processor as follows

Figure 2: Downloading results for local post-processing from inside the SimScale post-processor

A .zip file with the results is then downloaded. After the download is successful, extract the results from the .zip file to a folder, for example, on your desktop. The figure below shows the sample structure for the results folder, after the extraction:

simulation case files simscale — Figure 3: Folder with results from an incompressible cfd simulation after extracting the .zip files

For CFD cases, the case.foam file should be opened in ParaView. For FEA and Multi-purpose and Electromagnetics solver cases, the file that should be opened in ParaView is named case.pvd instead.

Now the results are ready to be imported into ParaView. Therefore, launch ParaView and click on the ‘Open’ button. Navigate to the folder containing the SimScale results and select the case.foam (or case.pvd) file.

opening a result set from simscale on paraview — Figure 5: Opening a case.foam file on ParaView to load a result set.

Now, in the properties panel, one can choose which parts of the data set should be loaded:

simscale cfd results open in paraview — Figure 6: Result set loaded in ParaView

In the mesh regions tab, choose which parts of the mesh should be loaded;
Under the cell arrays tab, one can define which parameters should be loaded in ParaView;
Click on ‘Apply‘ to open the results.

ParaView has a variety of filters that can be used for further post-processing. To apply a filter, you can simply right-click on an object in the pipeline browser and select the desired filter.