Silo File

Would someone pleases upload a .silo file for me of something? I want to make sure I have paraview working.

See attached. To view in paraview you’ll want to use the dropdowns in the top menubar to change the representation to surface, and then color by data array. Then use the clipping, slicing, thresholding, etc. tools to view different parts of the mesh.

Nick

tally.silo (1.79 MB)

Hey,

I’m having a bit of trouble getting it to show up. I open it, and tally.silo appears in the pipeline browser, but I don’t see anything to change the representation. The comboboxes don’t have anything in them.

In the properties tab in the dock in the lower left section of the main window you should see a list of meshes, materials, and cell arrays that are contained in the file. You have to select which ones to load, and then click apply. If these aren’t available, it may be that the version of Paraview you have doesn’t read silo files (although it should, or it would throw an error when you first open it)

Nick

Okay, got it.

All I see is a grey cube. Is this what I’m supposed to see?

At first, yep that’s what it should be after changing the representation to surface. You color it by one of the data arrays by choosing it from one of the other dropdowns. Note that in the file I attached, each data array corresponds to only one mesh, so it will only look right when the mesh coloring is using one of the corresponding data arrays. After coloring it, you’ll still just see a big blue cube - to see the interior you need to use the slicing or thresholding tools (the buttons in the top menubar right about where it says ‘pipeline browser’ in the picture you uploaded). To see how they work, add them to the pipeline and play with their properties in the properties tab on the bottom left, and click apply after each change.

You can use certain utilities in <openmc_root>/src/utils/ to automatically create SILO and VTK files for visualization in Paraview from the binary and HDF5 outputs of openmc (e.g. voxel.py for 3d geometry and statepoint_3d.py for meshtallies), or if you’re comfortable with Python you can follow the example given by those utilities to add more information to the files you create. This will give you finer control over what you can do with Paraview. For instance, if you know you only want to visualize fuel rods for a particular mesh tally, you can make your own script (or just modify one of the existing ones) to add another data array to the file when it’s created that contains some kind of plotting flag that you can then make a threshold filter on. So in this data array you could have logic that puts a zero for all mesh cells that aren’t on a fuel rod, and a one for all that are, and then in the threshold filter properties you select this array and say you only want to see mesh cells that have a value of 1. It takes a little more doing, but this is how you can get some cool 3d pictures!

Nick

Awesome. Got it! thank you!