By DE Editors

Integrate Visualization with Your Apps

Less than a month after Tecplot, Inc. (Bellevue, WA) announced Release 2 of its Tecplot 360 2006 visualization and post-processing software, it unveiled Tecplot Edge 3.0, a customizable version of Tecplot 360 that enables application developers to integrate visualization functionality with third-party applications.

Tecplot Edge 3.0

> > A Tecplot visualization of the plasma flow generated by the rotational movement of coronal loops anchored in dense plasma at the surface of the sun.

Tecplot Edge 3.0 is not a low-level graphics library, says the company. Rather, it provides you a complete visualization application out of the box, eliminating the coding and debugging visualization functionality.

Tecplot Edge 3.0 gives you the ability to add XY, 2D, and 3D data visualization and plotting capabilities into your solvers, simulation codes, and analysis applications. You can combine Tecplot Edge with your application as a loosely linked plotting tool or as a tightly integrated visualization engine, or maybe even a little of both.

Tecplot Edge 3.0 is based on the Tecplot 360 CFD and numerical simulation visualization platform, and it incorporates the advanced features of the newest Tecplot release. Tecplot 360, the company’s flagship product, provides integrated CFD-specific analysis tools that you can use to perform spatial integrations, generate particle trajectories, extract flow features, examine grid quality, and estimate numerical errors. It also provides for structural analysis visualizations, which means that you can load FEA and CFD solutions concurrently. Click here to go to the Tecplot 360 page on the company’s website. Click here to go DE’s current review of Tecplot 360.

Tecplot Edge 3.0

> >  In this example, Tecplot’s multiple contour feature floods a spacecraft’s contour by temperature.

Tecplot Edge 3.0 is available for Windows, Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC), Linux, and Unix. It supports UNICODE character sets on Windows, and all versions offer a suite of development tools for extending functionality and building platform-independent interface codes. An annual development license of Tecplot Edge 3.0 starts at $5,000. Click here to download a low-res PDF datasheet. Click here to go to the Tecplot Edge page on the Tecplot Inc. website.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.