Virtalis, Europe’s leading visualisation company, collaborated with Cambridge Flow Solutions to develop a demonstrator which shows how CFD data can be viewed in 3D stereo and interacted with in Virtual Reality. This demonstrator is known as GigaCell VR.

CFD is the process of predicting how fluids will behave by using modern computing power to solve equations that have been around since the 19th century. Understanding the behaviour of fluids is the key to much that we take for granted; from the car engine to the jet airliner, or even the ability to understand blood circulation in the body. So involved are the solutions to these deceptively brief equations that, until recently, they were impenetrable to all but a few institutions with huge supercomputers. Advances in computing and networking technologies mean that it is now possible to build a computer capable of these calculations from standard PC hardware.

GigaCell® VR is a Virtual Reality enabled, fully parallel post processor for cutting edge CFD:

• Industry standard VR
• Efficient Client-Server structure
• Proprietary visualisations
• Real-time parallel post processing

 The new system will allow people to literally immerse themselves in their CFD data.  Users will be able to hold boardroom style discussions actually inside very elaborate renderings. This ability will enable them to focus on what they need to alter to markedly improve their product.  GigaCell VR's advantages will be so apparent that soon all mainstream CFD users will move to 3D VR post-processing.

It is expected that aerospace, turbomachinery, combustion, motorsport, oil and gas and the chemical industry will be the sectors and activities with the most to gain from this new technology.  For example, normally in order to simulate the flow round an F1 car, gigabytes of data are generated, but one has to understand the details of the flow if one is to discover the crucial element that could make the car go faster.  Existing Cambridge Flow Solutions products already help by interrogating the data in such a way as to highlight such features, but being able to view it in 3D using GigaCell VR should make that differentiation even clearer.

Download the GigaCell VR information sheet -  GigaCell VR pdf (1.14 MB)  

Andrew Connell, technical director at Virtalis, commented: “Our combined system will be able to run CFD calculations over a few hundred million cells and we are developing a parallel post processor that will be infinitely scalable which will extend the life of the system. When in use, the system will appear to be effortless, but, in fact, up to a terabyte of data will be interrogated in real time and displayed in 3D. As the full model moves, the human brain will be able to simultaneously take in the whole problem, understand what it is seeing and, crucially, focus on the single critical point that requires further analysis.”

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