Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Happy New Year from Energy2D

In the year 2014, Energy2D has incorporated a radiation simulation engine and a particle simulation engine, expanding its modeling capacity and making it a truly multiphysics simulation package. To celebrate the New Year, I made some simulations that demonstrate these multiphysics features using objects shaped after the numbers of 2015.

These simulations feature the fluid dynamics engine, the heat conduction engine, the thermal radiation engine, and the particle dynamics engine. If you are curious enough, you can click this link to run the simulations.


These shapes were drawn using Energy2D's polygon and ring tools, which allow users to create a wide variety of arbitrary 2D shapes. Many users probably do not know how versatile the polygon tool actually is (the original triangle icon on the tool bar probably misleads some to think it is only good for drawing triangles -- so I changed it to look like a cross-section of an I-beam). The polygon tool allows one to easily draw a polygon with maximally 256 control points for adjusting its shape later. One can draw an approximate shape and then drag these control points to get it to the exact shape. To modify a shape even further, one can also insert a control point by double-clicking on an existing point. A new point will be added to the adjacent position, which you can then drag around. To delete a control point, just hold down the SHIFT key while double-clicking on it. In addition, a polygon can be rotated, twisted, compressed, or elongated using the corresponding fields in its property window (there is currently no graphical user interface for doing those things, however).

As for the New Year's resolutions, in 2015, the ring shape will be enhanced into a new tool called the shape subtractor, which allows users to subtract a shape from another to make a hollow one.

On the numerical simulation side, we will continue to improve the accuracy of the existing simulation engines by adding an explicit solver as an option for users to overcome some of the problems related to the implicit solvers.

On the multiphysics modeling side, we will try to support multiple fluids, which seems simple at first glance but has turned out to be a very difficult mathematical problem. With the capacity of multiple fluids, we will also be able to add an electromagnetism solver in order to model effects such as electrorheological fluids (fluids whose viscosity changes with respect to an applied electric field).

We wish all Energy2D users a very successful new year!

Sunday, December 21, 2014

The deception of unconditionally stable solvers

Unconditionally stable solvers for time-dependent ordinary or partial differential equations are desirable in game development because they are highly resilient to player actions -- they never "blow up." In the entertainment industry, unconditionally stable solvers for creating visual fluid effects (e.g., flow, smoke, or fire) in games and movies were popularized by Jos Stam's 1999 paper "Stable Fluids."

Figure 1: Heat conduction between two objects.
The reason that a solver explodes is because the error generated in a numerical procedure gets amplified in iteration and grows exponentially. This occurs especially when the differential equation is stiff. A stiff equation often contains one or more terms that change very rapidly in space or time. For example, a sudden change of temperature between two touching objects (Figure 1) creates what is known as a singularity in mathematics (a jump discontinuity, to be more specific). Even if the system described by the equation has many other terms that do not behave like this, one such term is enough to crash the whole solver if it is linked to other terms directly or indirectly. To avoid this breakdown, a very small time step must be used, which often makes the simulation look too slow to be useful for games.

The above problem typically occurs in what is known as the explicit method in the family of the finite-difference methods (FDMs) commonly used to solve time-dependent differential equations. There is a magic bullet for solving this problem. This method is known as the implicit method. The secret is that it introduces numerical diffusion, an unphysical mechanism that causes the errors to dissipate before they grow uncontrollably. Many unconditionally stable solvers use the implicit method, allowing the user to use a much larger time step to speed up the simulation.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, however. It turns out that we cannot have the advantages of both speed and accuracy at the same time (efficiency and quality are often at odd in reality, as we have all learned from life experiences). Worse, we may even be deceived by the stability of an unconditionally stable solver without questioning the validity of the predicted results. If the error does not drive the solver nuts and the visual looks fine, the result must be good, right?

Figure 2: Predicted final temperature vs. time step.
Not really.

The default FDM solver in Energy2D for simulating thermal conduction uses the implicit method as well. As a result, it never blows up no matter how large the time step is. While this provides good user experiences, you must be cautious if you are using it in serious engineering work that requires not only numerical stability but also numerical reliability (in games we normally do not care about accuracy as long as the visual looks entertaining, but engineering is a precision science). In the following, I will explain the problems using very simple simulations:

1. Inaccurate prediction of steady states

Figure 3. Much longer equilibration with a large time step.
Figure 1 shows a simulation in which two objects at different temperatures come into contact and thermal energy flows from the high-temperature object into the low-temperature one. The two objects have different heat capacities (another jump discontinuity other than the difference in initial temperatures). As expected, the simulation shows that the two objects approach the same temperature, as illustrated by the convergence of the two temperature curves in the graph. If you increase the time step, this overall equilibration behavior does not change. Everything seems good at this point. But if you look at the final temperature after the system reaches the steady state, you will find that there are some deviations from the exact result, as illustrated in Figure 2, when the time step is larger than 0.1 second. The deviation stabilizes at about 24°C -- 4°C higher than the exact result.
Figure 4. Accurate behavior at a small time step.

2. Inaccurate equilibration time

The inaccuracy at large time steps is not limited to steady states. Figure 3 shows that the time it takes the system to reach the steady state is more than 10 times (about 1.5 hours as opposed to roughly 0.1 hours -- if you read the labels of the horizontal time axis of the graph) if we use a time step of 5 seconds as opposed to 0.05 second. The deceiving part of this is that the simulation appears to run equally quickly in both cases, which may fool your eyes until you look at the numerical outputs in the graphs.

3. Incorrect transient behaviors

Figure 5. Incorrect behavior at a very large time step.
With a more complex system, the transient behaviors can be affected more significantly when a large time step is used. Figure 4 shows a case in which the thermal conduction through two materials of different thermal conductivities (wood vs. metal) are compared, with a small time step (1 second). Figure 5 shows that when a time step of 1,000 seconds is used, the wood turns out to be initially more conductive than metal, which, of course, is not correct. If the previous example with two touching objects suggests that the simulation result can be quantitatively inaccurate at large time steps, this example means that the results can also be qualitatively incorrect in some cases (which is worse).

The general advice is to always choose a few smaller time steps to check if your results would change significantly. You can use a large time step to set up and test your model rapidly. But you should run your model at smaller time steps to validate your results.

The purpose of this article is to inform you that there are certain issues with Energy2D simulations that you must be aware if you are using it for engineering purposes. If these issues are taken care of, Energy2D can be highly accurate for conduction simulations, as illustrated by this example that demonstrates the conservation of energy of an isolated conductive system.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Energy2D and Quantum Workbench featured in Springer books


Two recently published Springer books have featured our visual simulation software, indicating perhaps that their broader impacts beyond their originally intended audiences (earlier I have blogged about the publication of the first scientific paper that used Energy2D to simulate geological problems).

A German book "Faszinierende Physik" (Fantastic Physics) includes a series of screenshots from a 2D quantum tunneling simulation from our Quantum Workbench software that shows how wave functions split when they smash into a barrier. The lead author of the book said in the email to us that he found the images generated by the Quantum Workbench "particularly beautiful."

Another book "Simulation and Learning: A Model-Centered Approach" chose our Energy2D software as a showcase that demonstrates how powerful scientific simulations can convey complex science and engineering ideas.

Quantum Workbench and Energy2D are based on solving extremely complex partial differential equations that govern the quantum world and the macroscopic world, respectively. Despite the complexity in the math and computation, both software present intuitive visualizations and support real-time interactions so that anyone can mess around with them and discover rich scientific phenomena on the computer.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

European scientists use Energy2D to simulate submarine eruptions

The November issue of the Remote Sensing of Environment published a research article "Magma emission rates from shallow submarine eruptions using airborne thermal imaging" by a team of Spanish scientists in collaboration with Italian and American scientists. The researchers used airborne infrared cameras to monitor the 2011–2012 submarine volcanic eruption at El Hierro, Canary Islands and used our Energy2D software to calculate the heat flux distribution from the sea floor to the sea surface. The two figures in the blog post are from their paper.

According to their paper, "volcanoes are widely spread out over the seabed of our planet, being concentrated mainly along mid-ocean ridges. Due to the depths where this volcanic activity occurs, monitoring submarine volcanic eruptions is a very difficult task." The use of thermal imaging in this research, unfortunately, can only detect temperature distribution on the sea surface. Energy2D simulations turn out to be a complementary tool for understanding the vertical body flow.

Their research was supported by the European Union and assisted by the Spanish Air Force.

Although Energy2D started out as an educational program, we are very pleased to witness that its power has grown to the point that even scientists find it useful in conducting serious scientific research. We are totally thrilled by the publication of the first scientific paper that documents the validity of Energy2D as a research tool and appreciate the efforts of the European scientists in adopting this piece of software in their work.