Visualization Techniques of 3D Tensor Field in Geostress

The visualization techniques of 3D tensor field in geostress were analyzed and studied. Based on mathematical analysis, it was showed that the elastic geostress field is a symmetric second order tensor, which can be expressed as symmetric matrix and studied by its eigenvalue and eigenvector, and the quadratic surface corresponding to the second order tensor was derived. The difficulty of displaying six components simultaneously at one point in 3D space was solved. The visualization of second order geostress tensor fields along a principle direction with hyperstreamlines was implemented. The topology of three dimensional symmetric tensor fields was analyzed.