# 4.1. The Field-class and subclasses¶

To understand how cbcpost works, one first needs to understand the role of Fields. All desired postprocessing must be added to the PostProcessor as subclasses of Field. The class itself is to be considered as an abstract base class, and must be subclassed to make sense.

All subclasses are expected to implement (at minimum) the Field.compute()-method. This takes a single argument which can be used to retrieve dependencies from other fields.

An important property of the Field-class, is the parameters. Through the Parameterized-interface, it implements a set of default parameters that is used by the PostProcessor when determining how to handle any given Field, with respect to computation frequency, saving and plotting.

## 4.1.1. Subclassing the Field-class¶

To compute any quantity of interest, one needs to either use one of the provided metafields or subclass Field. In the following, we will first demonstrate the simplicity of the interface, before demonstrating the flexibility of it.

### 4.1.1.1. A viscous stress tensor¶

The viscous stress tensor for a Newtonian fluid is computed as

$\sigma(\mathbf{u}, p) = -p\mathbb{I}+\mu(\nabla \mathbf{u}+\nabla \mathbf{u}^T)$

where $$\mu$$ is the dynamic viscosity, $$\mathbf{u}$$ is the fluid velocity and $$p$$ is the pressure. A Field to compute this might be specified as the following:

from dolfin import *
from cbcpost import Field
class Stress(Field):
def __init__(self, mu, params=None, name="default", label=None):
Field.__init__(self, params, name, label)
self.mu = mu

def before_first_compute(self, get):
u = get("Velocity")

# Create Function container on space of velocity gradient
self._function = Function(V, name=self.name)

def compute(self, get):
u = get("Velocity")
p = get("Pressure")
mu = self.mu

return self.expr2function(expr, self._function)

Note that we have overridden three methods defined in Field:

• __init__
• before_first_compute
• compute

The __init__ method is only used to pass any additional arguments to our Field, in this case the viscosity. The keyword arguments params, name and label are passed directly to Field.__init__().

before_first_compute is used to do any costly computations or allocations that are only required once. This is called from the postprocessor before any calls to compute is made. In this case we create a container (_function) that we can later use to store our computations. We use the get-argument to fetch the field named Velocity, and the helper function get_grad_space() to get the gradient space of the Velocity (a TensorFunctionSpace).

The compute method is responsible for computing our quantity. This is called from the postprocessor every time the Planner determines that this field needs to be computed. Here we use the get-argument to fetch the Velocity and Pressure required to compute the stress. We formulate the stress, and converts to a function using the helper function Field.expr2function().

### 4.1.1.2. Computing the maximum pressure drop¶

In this next section, we demonstrate some more functionality one can take advantage of when subclassing the Field-class. In a flow, the maximum pressure drop gives an indication of the forces involved in the flow. It can be written as

$\tilde{p} := \max_{t \in [ 0,T ]} ( \max_{\mathbf{x} \in \Omega} p(\mathbf{x}, t) - \min_{\mathbf{x} \in \Omega} p(\mathbf{x}, t) )$

A Field-class to compute this can be implemented as

from dolfin import *
from cbcpost import Field
class PTilde(Field):
return [ Maximum("Pressure"), Minimum("Pressure") ]

def before_first_compute(self, get):
self._ptilde = 0.0
self._tmax = 0.0

def compute(self, get):
pmax = get("Maximum_Pressure")
pmin = get("Minimum_Pressure")
t = get("t")

if pmax-pmin > self._ptilde:
self._ptilde = pmax-pmin
self._tmax = t

return None

def after_last_compute(self, get):
return (self._ptilde, self._tmax)

Here, we implement two more Field-methods:

• after_last_compute

The add_fields method is a convenience function to make sure that dependent Fields are added to the postprocessor. This can also be handled manually, but this makes for a cleaner code. Here we add two fields to compute the (spatial) Maximum and Minimum of the pressure.

The method after_last_compute is called when the compution is finished. This is determined by the time parameters (see Parameters), and handled within the postprocessors Planner-instance.

## 4.1.2. Field names¶

The internal communication of fields is based on the name of the Field-instances. The default name is

[class name]-[optional label]

The label can be specified in the __init__-method (through the label-keyword), or a specific name can be set using the name-keyword.

When subclassing the Field-class, the default naming convention can overloaded in the Field.name-property.

## 4.1.3. The get-argument¶

In the three methods before_first_compute, compute and after_last_compute a single argument (in addition to self) is passed from the postprocessor, namely the get-argument. This argument is used to fetch the computed value from other fields, through the postprocessor. The argument itself points to the PostProcessor.get()-method, and is typically used with these two arguments:

• Field name
• Relative timestep

A call using the get-function will trigger a computation of the field with the given name, and cache it in the postprocessor. Therefore, a second call with the same arguments, will return the cached value and not trigger a new computation.

The calls to the get-function also determines the dependencies of a Field (see Dependency handling).

## 4.1.4. Parameters¶

The logic of the postprocessor relies on a set of parameters defined on each Field. For explanation of the common parameters and their default, see Field.default_params().

## 4.1.5. SolutionField¶

The SolutionField-class is a convenience class, for specifying Field(s) that will be provded as solution variables. It requires a single argument as the name of the Field. Since it is a solution field, it does not implement it does not implement a compute-method, but relies on data passed to the PostProcessor.update_all() for its associatied data. It is used to be able to build dependencies in the postprocessor.

## 4.1.6. MetaField and MetaField2¶

Two additional base classes are also available. These are designed to allow for computations that are not specific (such as PTilde or Stress), but where you need to specify the Field(s) to compute on.

Subclasses of the MetaField-class include for example Maximum, Norm and TimeIntegral, and takes a single name (or Field) argument to specify which Field to do the computation on.

Subclasses of the MetaField2 include ErrorNorm, and takes two name (or Field) arguments to specify which Fields to compute with.

## 4.1.7. Provided fields¶

Several meta fields are provided in cbcpost, for general computations. These are summarized in the following table:

 Time dependent Spatially restricted Norms and averages Other TimeDerivative SubFunction DomainAvg Magnitude TimeIntegral Restrict Norm TimeAverage Boundary PointEval ErrorNorm Maximum Minimum

For more details of each field, refer to metafields.