Fluid Mechanics Comes to Life in 3D
Fluid mechanics is tough to grasp—especially when you can’t see the air or water in motion. But now, using immersive mixed reality, students and faculty can see, touch, and interact with complex 3D airflow patterns around models like airfoils. This cutting-edge tech transforms invisible dynamics into hands-on experiences, helping students visualize, explore, and understand fluid flow like never before.
“Fluid Mechanics is probably the most difficult subject in our entire curriculum,” said Jun Chen , professor of mechanical engineering, who has taught the course for many years. “Most fluids like air or water are invisible, which make it very difficult to visualize—especially if we have complex three-dimensional or dynamic phenomena.”
Transcript
00:00:00 -Fluid mechanics is probably the most difficult subject in our entire ME curriculum. Fluids, most of it is invisible: for example, air or water. We cannot realize what's happening actually around the models, especially if we have very complicated three-dimensional highly dynamic phenomena. -No one can, with their human eyes, view fluid dynamics. It's not something that we can just see with our eyes. The work we're doing with Jun Chen is to visualize the airflow dynamics that they're looking at with the airfoil. Faculty and their students can gather together to look at the data, and experience the structural information in real time, all simultaneously. We can still see the real environment around us, and the actual people around us also wearing headsets, and the virtual content is superimposed with them. So they are effectively sharing the real room space around them with the virtual content that's being injected. They can grab it, move it,
00:01:05 scale it, spin it. They can walk around it. They can walk through it. They can look inside of it, if it has interior structures. They can draw on it for live diagramming, and the diagram travels with the object. So they can pass it around the room once a diagram has been placed on it. -The first time when I saw the 3D thing and also I can immerse myself into the 3D structure, I was shocked. You can touch it, you can sense it. They can enlarge it, they can turn it and they can examine the details. That experience is very very unique. -When we hop in the headsets, we go and see different airfoils and data sets and how flow flows over things. But it was interesting to just kind of like walk around and get under it and get in it. That's like definitely new to me. -When we talk about limitations in the lab reports, you only see that one plane of data. So,
00:01:54 it's really nice to be able to see it in a more 3D format. I can see this being really helpful to those in like the fluid mechanics lecture. I know a lot of my friends really struggle to see what the flow looks like over an airfoil. -Once they get past the immediacy of the, "Wow, this is neat, I see it in 3D," I want to get a little deeper than that and find out what can they actually perceive with this? What can they conceptualize better? What can they use this as a visualization tool to understand either more directly, more efficiently? Being able to pick up the content and in terms of an instructor teaching those students, being able to convey that information to them, communicate it more effectively so that they can understand it more rapidly than they would looking at it on a flat computer screen or a PowerPoint projector. -We want to motivate them to study this subject. So that kind of experience may
00:02:48 help them to develop the interest in it. So, that's a totally different experience. That intrigues me myself as a faculty, right? So I can sense this will be a big thing for our students.