PLOT3D Files

These are some examples of files associated with the PLOT3D program. PLOT3D is actually a plotting program used to display the results of various physical calculations. There is no single file format. Instead, there are families of file types whose structure depends on the spatial dimension, time dependence, and dimensionality of the object being stored.

PLOT3D File Characteristics:

• ASCII or binary
• 1D, 2D, or 3D
• No compression
• Multiple auxilliary variables allowed
• 3D data can be stored as a whole, or grouped into planes.

PLOT3D files include X, XY and XYZ files, which contain coordinate information, an XYZB file, which contains 3D coordinates and blanking information which suppresses some locations, Q files which include the density scalar, momentum vector, and energy scalar at each coordinate location, and F files, which record a single scalar value at each coordinate.

Reference:

1. Pamela Walatka, Pieter Buning, Larry Pierce, Patricia Elson,
   PLOT3D User's Guide,
   NASA TM 101067,
   March 1990,
   available in ../../pdf/plot3d_manual.pdf.

Routines to read a PLOT3D:

• PLOT3D_IO can read a variety of PLOT3D data file formats.

Routines to write a PLOT3D file:

• PLOT3D_IO can write a variety of PLOT3D data file formats.

Programs to convert a PLOT3D file to another format:

• TECPLOT includes a program called PREPLOT which can convert PLOT3D files to a format that can be read by TECPLOT.

Sample PLOT3D files:

• 3dm_q.dat, a large binary file of the Q format.
• 3dm_xyz.dat, a large binary file of the XYZ format.

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