From l.moresi@ned.dem.csiro.au Thu Apr 26 18:19:19 2001 Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 18:14:26 +0800 From: Louis Moresi To: Tobin Fricke Subject: Re: Lava Lamp [ Part 1, Text/PLAIN 60 lines. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] FEM is enormously complicated, and maybe not so well suited to a lava lamp anyway. For a graphics-orientated goal I would suggest, if you want to get some physical reality, that you look at the particle-based methods such as SPH (smooth particle hydrodynamics). These can be quite quick to code up (and I bet there'd be a demo version of something on the web too), handle the weird geometry associated with blobs that separate and coalesce, and run quite quickly. From a visualization point of view it's probably quite easy to deal with lots of particles making up the big blobs. You'd also find that it's possible to code some kind of surface tension effects into the particle methods which are missing in the simulation on my web site. If you want any more help on how to make the physics or the computational aspects work, drop me a line. (And I'd like to see the end results, by the way) Louis On Thursday, April 26, 2001, at 02:12 PM, Tobin Fricke wrote: Dear Dr. Moresi, I have selected as a project for a computer graphics class the modelling of a Lava Lamp. Although not required for the assignment, I'd like to make the model as physically accurate as I can. I found a web page announcing an AGU session on "thermochemical convection" with your name on it. This page has an animation of a lava-lamp type system with a caption saying that the lava lamp was modeled using the finite element method. I'm hoping that you might be able to point me towards accessible reading material on FEM, or that you might be able to explain briefly the technique and ideas involved in the lava lamp model. I checked out from the library a few books on FEM which I am currently trying to decipher. Any help you could provide would be much appreciated! Thank you, Tobin Fricke (UC Berkeley, Computer Science) [ the page I found is http://www.ned.dem.csiro.au/research/solidMech/Geodynamics/AGU99/AGU-announce.htm ] ======================================================================= Dr Louis Moresi - CSIRO Exploration & Mining l.moresi@ned.dem.csiro.au tel (+61 8 or 08) 9389 8421 fax (+61 8 or 08) 9389 1906 mob (+61 4 or 04) 0011 6370 Ignotum per Ignotius http://www.ned.dem.csiro.au/research/solidmech/Personnel/LouisMoresi =======================================================================