Ternary

Data Requirements

Select one Z column (or a range from one Z column). If this Z column has an associated X and an associated Y column, then these X and Y columns are used; otherwise, the worksheet's default X and Y values are used.

Creating the Graph

Select required data.

From the menu, choose Plot: Specialized: Ternary.

or

Click the Ternary button on the 2D Graphs toolbar.

Template

TERNARY.OTP (installed to the Origin program folder).

Notes

Ternary plots assume that the input data is normalized, which means that the sum of the absolute values of cells in every row equals to 1 or 100: |x|+|y|+|z|=1 or 100. If the input data has at least one data point that is not normalized, a Reminder Message dialog box will be showed to ask you whether to normalize your data before the ternary plot is created.

If you choose ?Yes?, Origin will normalize the input data and replace the original data with the normalized data in the worksheet. And if you choose ?No?, Origin will also normalize the input data and then plot, but the original data in the worksheet will not be changed. When you use Data Reader to read data from the ternary plot, you will read the unnormalized data.

The normalization is performed in the following steps for each row:

1. Sum the absolute values of the cells in the row:

   sum = | x | + | y | + | z |

   If the sum is not greater than 50, Origin will normalize the data to 1. But if this sum is greater than 50, Origin will normalize the data to 100.

2. Divide each cell value of this row by the sum calculated in the last step. In the case of normalization to 100, the values resulting from division should be then multiplied by 100.

The scales can be zoomed in and changed.