Filament Based Plasma

published in ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2022), Jul. 2022.

Marcel
Padilla
TU Berlin

Oliver
Gross
TU Berlin

Felix
Knöppel
TU Berlin

Ulrich
Pinkall
TU Berlin

Peter
Schröder
Caltech

Abstract

Simulation of stellar atmospheres, such as that of our own sun, is a common task in CGI for scientific visualization, movies and games. A fibrous volumetric texture is a visually dominant feature of the solar corona---the plasma that extends from the solar surface into space. These coronal fibers can be modeled as magnetic filaments whose shape is governed by the magnetohydrostatic equation. The magnetic filaments provide a Lagrangian curve representation and their initial configuration can be prescribed by an artist or generated from magnetic flux given as a scalar texture on the sun's surface. Subsequently the shape of the filaments is determined based on a variational formulation. The output is a visual rendering of the whole sun. We demonstrate the fidelity of our method by comparing the resulting renderings with actual images of our sun's corona.
DOI:10.1145/3528223.3530102

Super Quick Summary

  • Addresses Magnetoghydrostatic equations through a Lagrangian technique
  • Establish plasma filament model
  • Establish filament glow model
  • Procedurally generate solar-like images
  • Reproduce solar loop structures

 

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the DFG Collaborative Research Center TRR 109 "Discretization in Geometry and Dynamics," the Caltech Center for Information Science and Technology, and the Einstein Foundation Berlin. Additional support was provided by SideFX software. We thank the reviewers for their helpful input.

Cite

BibTeX:

@article{padilla2022filament,
  author    = {Marcel Padilla and Oliver Gross and Felix Kn\"{o}ppel and Albert Chern and Ulrich Pinkall and Peter Schr\"{o}der},
  title     = {Filament Based Plasma},
  journal   = {ACM Transaction on Graphics (TOG)},
  year      = {2022},
  month     = {07},
  volume    = {41},
  number    = {4},
  articleno = {153},
  doi       = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530102},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address   = {New York, NY, USA}
}

Note

This work will be wildly expanded and covered in more detail in my upcoming PhD thesis.