Wind Tunnels Deserve Better CFD Viz
Nominal Connect delivers interactive, full-rate CFD display – directly to your workstation
Wind tunnels and CFD solvers put aerospace teams closer to reality than ever before. Engineers capture complex flow phenomena with unprecedented fidelity, using CFD simulations to decide wing shapes down to the millimeter. But there's a catch.
These datasets – terabytes per run – break legacy visualization tools. Instead of providing clarity, complex sims create hurdles to overcome. Test engineers are forced to down-sample, disregard metadata and context, or else risk crashing their systems.
Nominal Connect finally unlocks the power of modern CFD, seamlessly rendering large-scale, time-resolved data in real time. Its procedural streaming system deliver these capabilities to standard engineering workstations, minimizing complex server integration and failure points. It delivers a cohesive, interactive picture of your systems right to your workstation – no matter how complex the computations.
These unique capabilities come from careful, iterative design choices of our own. Nominal Connect was tailor-made for hardware test by former hardware engineers who feel the pain of a visualization crashing at 2am. Let’s break it down.
Full-rate CFD replay
In iterative design cycles, engineers must explore transient flow fields, pressure distributions, and turbulent structures. This poses a unique difficulty for visualization software. While volumetric replays visualize data changes on fixed geometry, CFD replays must handle both changing geometry and dynamic attributes –significantly increasing data complexity.
Nominal Connect’s procedural streaming system ensures smooth, real-time frame generation even for these massive datasets. Instead of preloading all data, the system dynamically loads only what is necessary, allowing for frame-by-frame inspection at full resolution.
Users can pause at any frame, triggering full-resolution data loading for in-depth examination and filtering. This enables precise inspection of simulation details without performance bottlenecks.
By streaming data directly from disk to the GPU as needed, Nominal Connect allows engineers to interact with extremely large models on standard engineering workstations – a breakthrough for industries handling complex simulations.
Real-time sim-reality comparisons
Wind Tunnels introduce design to reality. They are the critical infrastructure that determine the accuracy of their calculations, that validate that predictions and measurements match.
Nominal Connect introduces a powerful and convenient way to validate real world measurements against pre-computed physics simulations in real time. Connect users can author automatic validation logic across multiple channels, surfacing insights and empowering engineers to adapt on the fly to new data and results
Conclusion
Nominal Connect unlocks the full-rate, real-time power of modern CFD. Engineers can maintain a continuous, cohesive vision of their data – they can spend their time planning the next test rather than fighting their own tools.
Wind tunnels are the backbone of innovation across aerospace, automotive, and more. Their operators deserve better than outdated, brittle tools. Nominal Connect enables wind tunnel engineers to improve test cadence, ensure test conditions are met, and accelerate post-test reporting.
Accelerate test. Accelerate progress. Accelerate the future.
We would like to thank Dr. Moritz for making FluidX3D, which was used to create the physics simulations above.