The Immersive Boundary (IB) Method attempts to model the elastic material as a part of the fluid with additional forces due to elastic stress. The fluid equations are solved in a Lagrangian fashion on a fixed regular lattice mesh. The elastic material is tracked by following a collection of representative points as they move across the mesh. The spacial configuration of these points is used to compute elastic forces which are applied to nearby fluid points in the lattice. In general, the method is applicable to any problem in which a fluid interacts with a flexible material.

The IB method has been applied to a wide variety of problems including a beating three-dimensional heart, valve-less pumping, blood clotting, the swimming motion of fish and eels, and the inner ear.

In such problems, the immersed boundary method opens up the prospect of raw simulation, almost akin to experiment, in which something approaching the full complexity of the system is allowed to operate in the model. -- Charles S. Peskin and David M. McQueen

www.airflow.ethz.ch
www.afc.ch
www.cfx-germany.com"

These calculations have allowed the capture efficiency of the local exhaust system to be estimated within the real working environment. Based on these results a prototype has been built and is now undergoing final testing in the wind tunnel. CFX-5 has proved to be a useful tool with which to optimise the REEXS design and will be used in further research for dimensioning of specific REEXS systems."

The RAVE (Reconfigurable Advanced Visualization Environment) consists of 3 8 foot by 8 foot rear-projection screens which can be configured as an 8x24 wall, or as a three-wall immersive environment.

"With EnSight Gold on the RAVE, a detailed model of an intricate structure with many components, such as a jet engine, can be viewed from all angles and diverse vantage points," says Jay Horowitz, visualization manager at NASA Glenn. "We can now bring our data visualizations more 'out of the screen' than before. It is surprising how much better you can understand complex phenomena when you have more control over how you view it."

The article starts with a brief introduction to CFD and then progresses to the need for, and difficulty of, simulating turbulent flow. While the article does not go into turbulence modeling in-depth, it does provide readers with a basic understanding of the problems involved and the solutions which have been developed.

The growing popularity of computational fluid dynamics to study turbulence reflects both its promise, which is at last starting to be realized, and the continued rapid increase in computational power. As supercomputer processing rates approach and surpass a trillion floating-point operations per second over the next few years, fluid dynamicists will begin taking on more complex turbulent flows, of higher Reynolds numbers.

Email: cindy.armstrong@cfx.aeat.com "