Collaborative Virtual Environments Used in the Design of Pollution Control Systems

In this paper the authors describe the development of an interactive simulation and analysis tool for injective pollu tion control systems for commercial boilers and incinera tors. This tool uses three-dimensional, immersive visuali zation techniques in the CAVE, which allows several sci entists to collaborate to quickly and effectively place mul tiple injectors and evaluate the resulting spray coverage. The required particle dynamics calculations and several techniques for the interactive visualization of computa tional fluid dynamics data and spray simulation are dis cussed. For optimizing system performance, the particle dynamics calculations are separate from the visualization process, and data are transferred to one or more CAVEs by using the CAVEcomm message-passing library. The authors discuss the demonstration of this tool as part of the I-WAY GII testbed and present performance results for different architectures and network configurations using both ethernet and ATM connectivity. The experiments show that ethernet bandwidth is insufficient for remote, interactive collaboration.