EMAIL:laf@laxpower.com
NAME: Laurence A. Feldman and Shane Moura
TOPIC: Speed
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETTION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Mach One
WEBPAGE: To Be Available March 1
COUNTRY: USA
RENDERER USED: povray v3.6
TOOLS USED: 3-D Studio for the geometric modeling of the X-1
RENDER TIME: 295 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Pentium IV, 3.2 GHz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: On Oct 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 experimental
aircraft to Mach 1.06 and represents the first flight where man has gone supersonic
and lived to tell about it. "The Sound Barrier" or flying at the speed of sound
causes shocks to develop on the leading edges of the aircraft and the control systems
of airplanes would 'lock' resulting in loss of control. The X-1 flight crew
discovered how to maintain control under these unstable flight scenarios. This
image depicts the shock waves over the aircraft at Mach 1 employing translucent
isosurfaces. After a shock wave (compression) occurs, the flow will expand and this
is demonstrated by the volume rendering of density. 
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The X-1 was modelled by Shane Moura
using 3-D Studio. The x-1 is composed of approximately 110,000 triangles and
has inside components as well as extensive texture-mapping. The Geometric Model
was input into a 3-D Computationalal Fluid Dynamics program 'NEWTUN' which
computed the flow-field at various flight speeds including Mach 1. The output
was then read into 'ENSIGHT' a scientific visualization program developed by
CEI and isosurfaces were computed (triangles). The flow-field was translated to
a 'density file' and the isosurfaces were translated to a pov-ray file. The CFD
calculation required a 52 million cell grid around the model (375x375x375) and
required approximately 5 hours of compute time on a Pentium IV 3.2 Ghz PC with
2 gigabytes of memory.


