Particle trace calculation can be expensive for large or transient datasets and/or a large number of particles. Be careful when you initiate a trace operation, there is currently no way to abort it. If you are calculating pathlines, you should specify as many particles as possible at one time. Much of the pathline execution time is in reading the transient data from disk and this operation has to be performed regardless of how many traces were specified.

The EnSight particle trace algorithm integrates the vector flow field over time using a 4th-order Runge-Kutta method with a time varying integration step. Several of the integration parameters can be changed by the user. See Particle Trace Parts in the Ansys EnSight User Manual for more information.

If you have trace data for other types of particles (for example, for multi-phase flow simulations), you can use the discrete/measured data facility to load the particle path positions and animate them over time.