Visualisation of FFEA tool results

Hi all, have you noticed that it is end of summer? This summer was so crazy fast, that I almost didn’t notice.

Now it is time to explain to you what I have done during the last two months. Don’t worry, I will mind the quote of one of my friends and try to show that I understand the topic.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

There is a research group at University of Leeds, which wants to model the dynamics of proteins. Usually these simulations are at the atomic level, which means that it is computationally intensive and for large protein domains, it isn’t feasible.

As a solution to this problem this group developed a Fluctuating Finite Element Analysis (FFEA) tool. The protein is discretised into a tetrahedral mesh, and the dynamics due to thermal fluctuations are resolved through Finite Element Analysis. This tool has an output which was visualised in TKinter viewer (python GUI), but the performance of the viewer is not sufficient, because it is very slow and has only basic features. And my work should solve this problem.

The first idea was to enhance the existing viewer, but we decided, that the best possible solution would be to convert the output to VTK file format and visualise the data in the well known and widely-used visualisation tool ParaView.

With the new ParaView visualisation, we may visualise all of the features which were in the previous visualisation tool, and now there are also some new features, which makes it easier to understand the data. It is also possible to make a video and present the results to wide public.

Visualisation of protein and its intern forces.

And this picture is one of examples of visualisation output. For more project details read the final report 😉