Hi, apologies if this has been asked before - i searched but couldn’t find an answer. I’m attempting to read in a .dat file with the Tecplot reader but keep encountering errors. The SOLUTIONTIME and STRANDID warnings can be solved by removing them from the header, but it doesn’t fix the record type error. That “record” is the first value in the dat file. If I read in as a Tecplot table the importer picks it up fine. Am I missing a simple formatting issue?
Unlikely to be the issue, but this dat file was created by FUN3D. And I’ve replicated the error in Paraview 5.6 on Linux and Paraview 5.7/5.8 on Windows.
I was also struggling with tecplot dat files. This is what I figured out after searching info in many blogs:
• X, Y and Z array headers MUST NOT have other characters like [mm]. It must be simply “x”, “y” and “z”.Paraview also accepts this: “Z, mm” and this “x/c”
• This parameter is not allowed by Paraview (it must be deleted from the file): “ZONETYPE=…”
• “STRANDID” and “SOLUTION TIME” are currently unsupported by Paraview but they can be left in the file (it gives only a warning message)
• Comments are allowed by using “#” (like Python)
A couple of changes are needed to read this in properly.
First swap the i= & j= to n= & e= respectively. These are the number of nodes/elements in each zone, so you may have to change this multiple times if your file has multiple zones.
Next, an element type needs to be added after the zonetype by specifying, et=. This will be something like triangle or quadrilateral for 2D. I haven’t tried 3D elements, but tetrahedral and or brick would be potential options.
I solved my question: A .dat file from tecplot opening in Paraview should have the form:
TITLE = “”
VARIABLES = “X”
“Y”
“Z”
“DU1”
“DU2”
“DU3”
“U1”
“U2”
“U3”
“S11”
“S22”
“S33”
“S12”
“S13”
“S23”
ZONE T=“0.1000D-01”
STRANDID=0, SOLUTIONTIME=0
Nodes=12, Elements=2, ZONETYPE=FEBrick
DATAPACKING=BLOCK
DT=(SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE )
0.000000000E+00 1.000000000E+00 1.000000000E+00 0.000000000E+00 0.000000000E+00
1.000000000E+00 1.000000000E+00 0.000000000E+00 1.990000010E+00 1.990000010E+00
1.990000010E+00 1.990000010E+00
…
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
…
I also struggled to re-format the ASCII *.dat Tecplot files into a format that Paraview could read. Furthermore, running transient simulations, I needed to convert hundreds of files at a time for solution animations. I wrote a guide that has some commands that can be used to create a bash script that can operate on a set of files and convert them using the stream editor “sed” terminal command. So far it has worked as intended on FUN3D boundary files, and sampling plane files. It can take some time to run through a collection of files.
