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2D Placement of Streamlines
Reference Manual

Abdelkrim Mebarki

Vector and direction fields are commonly used for modeling physical phenomena, where a direction and magnitude, namely a vector is assigned to each point inside a domain.

A streamline is a curve everywhere tangent to the field. It can be considered as the path traced by an imaginary massless particle dropped into a steady fluid flow described by the field.

A streamline is represented as a polyline iteratively elongated by bidirectional numerical integration started from a seed point, until it comes close to another streamline, hits the domain boundary, or reaches a critical point.

The Stream_lines_2 class consists of saturating the domain with a set of tangential streamlines in accordance with a specified density.

Streamlines are represented as containers of points, manipulated by an iterator range of points, and the whole placement is accessible via an iterator range of streamlines.

The main class in this package, the Stream_lines_2 class of Cgal depends on two template parameters. The first template parameter stands for a class which represents both the vector field and the visualization domain with operations on them, and should be instantiated by a model of the concept VectorField_2. The second template parameter stands for a function object that ensures the numerical integration used to construct the streamlines, and should be instantiated by a model of the concept Integrator_2.