TITLE: Mach One NAME: Laurence A. Feldman and Shane Moura COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: laf@laxpower.com WEBPAGE: To Be Available March 1 TOPIC: Speed COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETTION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mach1.jpg ZIPFILE: mach1.zip 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.