Stakes and Issues for Collaborative Remote Laboratories in Virtual Environments

The mainstream adoption of remote laboratories and 3D virtual environments for teaching in the field of electrical and electronic engineering education is continuing to grow. This chapter will investigate opportunities and issues related to the integration of remote laboratories and virtual worlds in this context. Some practical implementations of this integrated approach using the Sun Wonderland project and Second Life will be discussed with a particular focus on the perceived advantages of virtual worlds, e.g. collaborative group working, group awareness/interaction, and the 3D Graphical user interface. From this discussion initial guidelines related to creating a standardized architecture for integrating remote labs into virtual worlds are presented and the role of each individual component of the architecture catalogued.

Blade Tip Measurement Advanced Visualization Using a Three Dimensional Representation

A microwave tip clearance sensor capable of measuring the hottest stages of industrial and aero gas turbines has been developed. This new microwave sensor has been integrated into a commercial package for online real-time monitoring of machine data. However, data analysis of large numbers of tip clearance probes makes standard industry graphic techniques cluttered. A method has been developed to reduce this data and visualize it in order to provide intuitive representations of the data from which a user can quickly draw the right conclusions about machine behavior. The main motivation for the development of a 3D graphical user interface is the density of information that can be shown to the user at one time. Tip clearance measurement is very data-rich, as every individual blade for each sensor mounted around the engine case is available. The result is that it may be difficult to find slight changes within hundreds of clearance trends. Only specialists with long experience in tip clearance measurement can synthesize all the data quickly enough using standard 2D plots. The 3D graphical user interface brings all of this data together to calculate the aggregated blade pattern, rotor positioning, and estimated case shape. All of these measurements are available to the user in a single visualization. Colors indicating alarm or clearance scale quickly draw attention to the most important data such as the minimum clearance point around the engine case where a rub may be likely to occur. This method is based about a case shape fitting algorithm that combines data from multiple sensors to make a case shape estimate based on fitting of a non-uniform rational B-spline (NURB). The scaling is also distorted in order to accentuate the graphics in a way that provides an intuitive understanding of the machine state. The method of applying this data accentuation is important so as to not be misleading. This innovative navigation interface presented in this paper capitalizes on modern advances in computer graphics to aid engineers and operators in understanding, access, monitoring, and analysis of tip clearance and air-gap measurements.

Efficient Fracture Design for Complex Turbine Engine Components

Many high-energy turbine engine components are fracture critical. However, the complex three-dimensional (3d) geometries and stress fields associated with these components can make accurate fracture analysis impractical. This paper describes a new computational approach to efficient fracture design for complex turbine engine components. The approach employs a powerful 3D graphical user interface (GUI) for manipulation of geometry models and calculated component stresses to formulate simpler 2D fracture models. New weight function stress intensity factor solutions are derived to address stress gradients that vary in all directions on the fracture plane.

Visualization of Heat Transfer and Core Damage With RGUI 1.5

Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) have become an integral and essential part of computer software. In the ever-changing world of computing, they provide the user with a valuable means to learn, understand, and use the application software while also helping applications adapt to and span different computing paradigms, such as different operating systems. For these reasons, GUI development for nuclear plant analysis programs has been ongoing for a decade and a half and much progress has been made. With the development of codes such as RELAP5-3D [1] and SCDAP/RELAP5 that have multi-dimensional modeling capability, it has become necessary to represent three-dimensional, calculated data. The RELAP5-3D Graphical User Interface (RGUI) [4] was designed specifically for this purpose. It reduces the difficulty of analyzing complex three-dimensional models and enhances the analysts’ ability to recognize plant behavior visually. Previous versions of RGUI [5] focused on visualizing reactor coolant behavior during a simulated transient or accident. Recent work has extended RGUI to display two other phenomena, heat transfer and core damage. Heat transfer is depicted through the visualization of RELAP5-3D heat structures. Core damage is visualized by displaying fuel rods and other core structures in a reactor vessel screen. Conditions within the core are displayed via numerical results and color maps. These new features of RGUI 1.5 are described and illustrated.