Sources of error in the graphical analysis of CFD results

Graphical techniques are widely used to analyze CFD solutions. Some of these techniques have inherent errors, making them represent the solution imprecisely. An understanding of these errors is important for proper interpretation of the computed results and for comparison with experiments. Examples include contouring, plotting of vector fields, particle tracing, and computation of flow functions involving integration or differentiation.This paper is declared a work of the U. S. Government and therefore is in the public domain.