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Visualizing Aircraft Aerodynamic Design
Pages 25-28

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From page 25...
... CFD is used to simulate the airflow around aircraft, thus allowing engineers controlled exploration of various aerodynamic concepts without their having to resort to expensive time in real wind tunnels. CFD simulations often result in complex, time-varying flow patterns, the details of which can be critical in determining the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft being simulated.
From page 26...
... Although modern workstations may be able to compute and render a very few simple visualizations within the performance requirements described above, the complexity of modern CFD simulations makes complex visualization environments, with many active visualization techniques in the scene, highly desirable. The resulting computational burden typically saturates the computational power of even the most powerful modern workstation, particularly for time-varying simulations where all visualizations must be recomputed with every frame.
From page 27...
... This remains an unsolved problem, and it will only worsen as simulation sizes increase. Existing compromises include restricting the data set to allow more time steps to fit into physical memory and using widely striped disks for increased bandwidth (NASA Ames has a disk system that has attained bandwidths in excess of 300 megabytes per second)
From page 28...
... It is these tools the user manipulates directly. There are several features of the VWT architecture critical to its success: the computation and graphics are implemented in separate, asynchronous, concurrent processes so that a slowdown in the computation does not impede the head-tracked aspects of the display; the visualizations and tools are implemented in an object-oriented class hierarchy designed so that new visualizations or tools may be added without having to modify existing visualizations or tools; and a number of display and interaction technologies are supported, ranging from conventional workstation and mouse through head-mounted displays and gloves, with a unified interaction paradigm.


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