Abstract: Reproducing a real-time flow field is an important approach for examining hydrodynamic processes and helping find the laws underlying flow motions, and becomes a challenging hotspot in computer simulation studies. Application of flow visualization technology enables a more direct and complete information acquisition for end users. This study develops a B/S structure channel flow visualization platform with application to the flows in the Bei River navigation channel, focusing on the Image Based Flow Visualization (IBFV) technology. In this platform, integration of dynamic visualization with a cesium framework is achieved by adopting both the render to texture technology and the ping-pong technology－commonly used in general-purpose graphics processing; this viewpoint-based dynamic rendering method can be used to demonstrate effectively the details of layer-dependent flows. In the application, our new method generates a series of coherent images at a high operating rate of 60 frames per second. Thus, it would promote the application of flow field visualization technologies for far-end access through a certain Web-supported system.

Key words: flow visualization, digital watershed, 3D visualization, image based flow visualization, B/S structure