Senior Project - SCAT

The goal of this project was to design and build a graphical interface between fluid-dynamics-software packages and a scientific-graphics package. The fluid-dynamics software included an in-house object-oriented C++ code under development for moving-boundary problems, along with several commercial packages. The fluid-dynamics-software packages all use either finite-element or finite-volume techniques in which the geometry is subdivided into n-sided elements, defined by a geometric grid. During the course of a simulation, data is generated at each grid point describing the temperature, pressure, species concentration, velocity and position of that point at each step in time. The graphical interface takes this enormous amount of data and displays it in a number of interesting and useful ways. These include velocity-vector plots and streamlines and other contour plots, corresponding to a series of time steps during simulations, which allow for animation over time. The software works with the X Window System via InterViews and was developed using an object-oriented approach in C++.