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November 12, 2015

Simulation showing turbulance

This simulation shows the resulting turbulence as water flows past a NACA 0024 airfoil that approximates a ships hull. A ship moving through water forms steep breaking waves, shedding spray along the crests and also near the ships bow, where thin sheets of water form. The U.S. Navy uses such simulations to learn how water interacts with naval vessels, not only to understand the propulsive power needed to overcome water resistance, but also to study the signature that the ship leaves in its wake, and to model how waves, which can break anywhere along the hull, affect ship stability.

Paul Navratil and Bill Barth of the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin and Hank Childs of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory created these visualizations from simulations performed by Doug G. Dommermuth of Science Applications International Corporation.

The visualizations were generated using the Texas Advanced Computing Center's (TACC) Longhorn, a National Science Foundation (NSF) XEDE cyberinfrastructure resource funded under NSF award ACI 09-06379.

(Date image taken: July 2012; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: Nov. 12, 2015)

Credit: Paul A. Navratil, William L. Barth and Karla Vega, Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin


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