Airfoil start-stop motion (circular) with 50,000 tracers
3,584 views · Published 7 March 2011 · 0:14 · Indexed 11 October 2026
Channel: Paul Nathan · 2011 · Education
Now it's time to make the computer work hard ;-D! I added 50,000 passive tracer particles that are advected by the local flow field and also indicate the instantaneous velocity vector. This took half a day to compute on one core of a 3.5GHz AMD Phenom X2 550 (overclocked by 0.45GHz, of course. On the edge of stability ;-D ). The computation per frame increases with time since more and more wake vortex panels are shed and these are consequently included in the loop that calculates the wake-induced velocities and also their own self-advection.
