Plotting Your Output
The developers for OpenMOC have paid special attention to carefully integrating data visualization within the simulation. There are a number of different things which can be plotted during a simulation run. The command line options for plotting various features is described in Run OpenMOC. More information about the plotting capabilities are described below.
##Plotting Tracks
Tracks are a plotted by default during each simulation run. Two plots will be created: one called tracks.ext and segments.ext where .ext is an extension that can be tiff, png, jpg, or pdb. As a user can specify which extension you want OpenMOC to use for each simulation run as described in Run OpenMOC.
The tracks.ext file will mostly likely be a nearly black image unless you use a very coarse mesh of tracks (few azimuthal angles along with a coarse track spacing). An example of some plotted tracks is shown below.
The segments.ext file will use different colors for each segment of each track. The colors are the same for each flat source region. An example of some plotted segments is shown below.
##Plotting the Geometry
There are a number of options for plotting your geometry. By default, OpenMOC will create a file called fsr.ext which will plot the geometry using a color-coding scheme to plot each flat source region with a different color. In addition, you can indicate to OpenMOC whether you wish to plot the geometry color-coded by material type and/or cell type which will produce a materials.ext and/or cells.ext file. The runtime options for doing so are detailed at Run OpenMOC. An example of the geometry for the C5G7 benchmark is shown plotted by flat source region, cell, and material below.
##Plotting the Flux Distribution
By default, the flux distribution throughout your geometry input file will be plotted using a simple algorithm to match colors to certain flux levels. This will be done if the file extension which you specify for plotting is tiff, png or jpg. These plots will show you where flux values are similar but the coloration will not give you much intuition about where the flux is highest and lowest in the geometry. An example of the flux distribution plotted in this way for one geometry is shown below.
If you instead specify the file extension pdb all of the output files will be created as .pdb files which can be interpreted by some visualization tools such as VisIt. If you haven't installed VisIt, please view our Install OpenMOC page for information on how to do so. VisIt is a powerful tool for plotting the flux distribution as it will create a more useful gradient of colors throughout the geometry than the default plotting shown above. An example of VisIt plots of the flux distribution for a full core geometry are shown below.
To learn more about how to use VisIt, check out our tutorial Using VisIt/Silo.