Interactive 3-D visualization of construction of geothermal field with IDL

Geothermal resources management systems and geological material visualization applications often need user-steered interactive displays of a geological body representing the underlying sparse borehole data. This paper presents an approach for characterization of 3D shape and relationships of groundwater units by using data obtained from the borehole. At the same time, we realize interactive visualization. There are four Groundwater units in research area: impermeable stratum, which is made of the Quarternary sand clay; water-bearing stratum, which is made of Quarternary silt sands, gravel and sandstone geothermal rock groups; water-bearing stratum, which is made of rock with crack configuration geothermal rock groups; impermeable, which is made of rock. The methodology encompasses the following main steps: the borehole data are linearly interpolated on geological characteristics, divided the entire set of 2D sections into subsets of "similar" 2D sections; To generate 2D sections using the elements of each subset using the triangulation (Delaunay) and Kriging arithmetic; To divide the entire set of border points that belong to a sub-set of similar 2D sections into classes of "corresponding" border points; build 3D grid data. 3D objection is visualized employing Direct Volume Rendering (DVR), which includes ray-casting and z-buffer algorithm. Visualization is realized in programmable data analysis and visualization environment IDL. With this approach Fuzhou geothermal field three-dimension visualization system was developed successfully. It is able to realize three-dimensional interactive incision, analysis and query.