Post-processing of LIGGGHTS® simulations

For post-processing of LIGGGHTS® simulation, we recommend the Open Source visualisation toolbox PARAVIEW

We recommend you to take the following steps:

  • 1. Download Paraview here and install/compile it on your system.
  • 2a. Use the tool called LPP (details see below) to convert LIGGGHTS® simulation data to VTK format.
  • 2b. Alternatively, get the Sandia's original version of pizza.py here. It comes with a short doc how to use it. For a general doc, please also visit the pizza.py website.
  • 2c. Alternatively, there is user-contributed LIGGGHTS® dump file reader plugin that can be found here. Thanks to Christian Richter (OVGU) for providing this.

LPP (LIGGGHTS® post-processing) is a modified version of pizza.py by Sandia National Labs . It coverts LIGGGHTS® dump files into VTK in parallel using the python multiprocessing toolkit and can handle dump-files chunk-wise rather that loading all the data into memory at once (as pizza.py does). It comes with a doc how to use it. You will then be able to use vector glyphs of particle velocity, forces and can easily post-process user-defined per-particle vectors or scalars. It also contains a feature to analyze wall stresses on stationary and/or moving geometry. Of course, you can still use all the pizza functionality. LPP is an extended version of pizza.py - extensions have been implemented by Stefan Amberger, Philippe Seil (both JKU) and Christoph Kloss (DCS Computing).

LPP can be downloaded by git only. For download and installation follow this procedure:
Open a terminal and go to the desired installation path, then download the latest version of LPP by typing:
git clone git@github.com:CFDEMproject/LPP.git
To install LPP execute ./install.sh in the LPP directory and follow the instructions given.

Add and adapt the following alias to your ~/.bashrc (not necessary if you have CFDEM®coupling installed already, which will perform these settings for you):
export LPP_DIR=$HOME/LIGGGHTS/LPP/src
export LPP_NPROCS=4
export LPP_CHUNKSIZE=1
alias lpp='python -i $LPP_DIR/lpp.py --cpunum $LPP_NPROCS --chunksize $LPP_CHUNKSIZE'