The Concord Consortium

Link to simulation

A rocket mass heater is an innovative and highly efficient space heating system, which is popular among natural building DIYers since its invention in 1970s. A number of engineers who are interested in rocket stove design have used our Energy2D software to visualize the thermal physics involved.

Link to simulation

Martin Karl Waldenburg from Germany has designed a series of simplified rocket stove simulations. With his permission, we have published his simulations on our Energy2D website. This blog post provides links to three of his simulations. Another one was created by Pinhead of the Rocket Stove Forum (who also gave us permission to publish his simulation).

Link to simulation

Link to simulation

Since Energy2D hasn't supported chemical reactions yet, in all these simulations, burning is simulated using a heater with a fan to approximate the driving pressure due to combustion.

We will continue to work on Energy2D's computational engine and improve its graphical user interface. Currently, we are plowing through the math needed to model thermal radiation, chemical reactions, and phase changes. Once these features are added, we hope more people will find it useful, educational, and entertaining.

The day/night cycle of an SUT

The solar updraft tower is a new-concept clean energy power plant for generating electricity from the sun. Sunshine falling on a greenhouse collector structure around the base of a tall chimney heats the air within it. The resulting convection causes air to rise up in the tower, driving wind turbines to produce electricity. In 2011, a plan of building a massive solar updraft tower in Arizona was announced (for more information, see this CNN report: Can hot air be the free fuel of the future?).

Compared with other solar technologies, solar updraft towers have many significant advantages. For example, it does not require water; it can be built in barren areas; it can still generate electricity after dark; its lifetime is much longer than solar panel arrays; and so on. Engineering-wise, it is a sound concept. The rest is a political will to get it banked and constructed. Let's hope it wouldn't take too long.

Streamline analysis of air intake

Instead of waiting for it to come true, why not go to our Energy2D website and see a bunch of simulations? You can even start to investigate it with our powerful Energy2D software. For example, you can turn the sunlight on and off to investigate how the heat absorbed during the day can still be released at night to drive the turbines. You can adjust the height of the tower to get an idea of why engineers want to build an insanely tall tower that rivals the height of Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world. You can even use Energy2D's comprehensive analysis tools to study what happens when you block one of the air intake entrances.

The opportunities of inquiry with Energy2D are practically endless. You don't have to wait for someone to erect a solar updraft tower to explore about the technology -- you can do it now and the concept of a new technology is only a few mouse clicks away from you. Why not show these simulations and your investigations to your students to get them interested in clean energy today?

A Trombe wall is a sun-facing wall separated from the outdoors by glass and an air space. It consists a solar absorber (such as a dark surface) and two vents for air in the house to circulate through the space and carry the solar heat to warm the house up. In a way, a Trombe wall is like a machine that uses air as a convey belt of thermal energy harvested from the sun. Trombe walls are very simple and easy to make and are sometimes used in passive solar green buildings.


Hiding sophisticated power of computational fluid dynamics behind a simple graphical user interface, our Energy2D software can easily simulate how a Trombe wall works. The two images in this blog post show screenshots of a Trombe wall simulation and its closeup version. You can play the simulation on this page and download the models there. If you open the models using Energy2D, you should be able to see how easy it is to tweak the models and create realistic heat flow simulations.

Solar chimneys operate based on similar principles. Energy2D should be able to simulate solar chimneys as well. Perhaps this would be a good challenge to you. (I will post a solar chimney simulation later if I figure out how to do it.)

Thermoregulation

Project Lead The Way (PLTW) is the leading provider of rigorous and innovative Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education curricular programs used in middle and high schools across the US. The PLTW Pathway To Engineering (PTE) program includes a foundational course called the Principles of Engineering (POE) designed for 10-11th grade students. PLTW curriculum currently reaches 4,780 schools.

According to Bennett Brown, Associate Director of Curriculum and Instruction of PLTW, our Energy2D software will be adopted in the POE curriculum to support a variety of core engineering concepts including power, energy, heat transfer, controls, and environmental factors.

Solar heating cycles

Since the release of the first alpha version in 2011, Energy2D has already been used by thousands of users worldwide, but the collaboration with PLTW will be a big step forward for Energy2D to reach more students. The timing of this collaboration is particularly important to engineering tools such as Energy2D, as--for the first time--engineering has been officially written into the US K-12 Science Education Standards. Once the Standards roll out, thousands of teachers will be looking for leading-edge tools that can help them teach engineering. This will be a great opportunity for Energy2D.

Why is Energy2D so special that people want to use it? Our website provides many self-explanatory examples. But there is one hidden gem I want to emphasize here: Its computational engine is based on good algorithms I devised specially for this simulator. Its heat solver can be so accurate that a simulation can maintain the total energy of an isolated system at a level as accurate as 99.99% for as long as it runs, regardless of the complexity of the structures in the system! The fact that the sum of energy from all the 10,000 grid cells remains a constant after billions of individual calculation steps reflects the holy grail of science and engineering. If anything, engineering is about accuracy. A good engineering tool should be able to give students a good engineering habit of mind and accuracy should be a paramount part of it.

The first stable version of Energy2D, an open-source and free heat transfer simulation tool made possible by funding from the National Science Foundation, is now available for download. The program can be installed as a desktop app, which can be used to create high-quality simulations that can be deployed on the Internet as applets. It comes with about 40 templates to help you get started to design your own simulations. The Energy2D website provides plenty of examples that show how you can integrate your simulations on your websites. The examples cover a wide range of topics in heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and thermal engineering. Thermal engineering is a major feature added recently and will be expanded in the future. The example to the right, "How solar cycles affect the duty cycle of a thermostat," showcases this new feature.

When you click the "Java Webstart Installer" on the website, the software will be automatically downloaded and installed on your desktop. The website's Download page has detailed information for how to publish your Energy2D simulations or integrate them with your web stuff.

If you have used the Energy2D app before, you will need to remove the previous installation in order to enjoy the convenience of full OS integration that this version offers. For Windows users, go to "Control Panel > Java." For Mac users, go to the Java Preference. In either case, you can find the previous installation in "Temporary Internet Files."

If you have just used the online applets on our website but haven't downloaded the app, there is nothing you need to remove. Although it is perfectly fine to use the online applets as they are, we think you should try the app--It will give you the full ability to create, design, and test.

Energy2D is our signature software for heat transfer and fluid dynamics simulations. Written in Java, it runs speedily either as a standalone app on your desktop or an embedded applet within a browser. It is actively being developed to meet the need of energy education to have an interactive and constructive learning environment based on rigorous scientific principles. Energy2D is already a highly interactive system--you can change anything that is allowed to change by the author of a simulation while it is running. Recently, I have added two new features to make it even more interactive. Both features apply to all existing Energy2D simulations I (or you) have created.

The first one is a "heat dropper," a mode in which the user can click or drag the mouse to add or remove heat from the location in the model that the mouse points to. If you have a touch screen, you can touch or swipe your finger across it and the heat dropper works as if your finger could give heat to the virtual space in the simulation. The first video in this blog post shows how it works.

The second one is a "field reader," a mode in which the user can move the mouse to read the value of a property distribution field at the location the mouse points to. Currently, the supported property fields include temperature, thermal energy, and fluid velocity (which will be zero in a solid). The second video shows how it works.

If a web page that embeds an Energy2D applet doesn't already have a drop-down menu on the page for you to switch to these modes, you can always access them through the View Options dialog window. The View Options menu can be found if you right-click on a spot in the simulation window that is not occupied by a model component (like a polygon or a sensor).

Run this simulation.

The Kármán vortex street is a repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of flow of a fluid over bluff bodies. It is named after the great scientist Theodore von Kármán who co-founded NASA's JPL. This effect is observable in nature like in a stream, but you need some luck since it requires some picky conditions that are not always there for you.

Now, with our online simulation program Energy2D you can create and investigate the Kármán vortex street in your browser without depending on Mother Nature to give you an opportunity window.

For example, you can test how big an obstacle should be in order to produce this effect. You will find that an obstacle must be large enough to create a steady vortex street. If the shape of the obstacle is not streamlined, what will you see?

If you stick a thermometer in a thermal vortex street, you should see that the temperature will swing pretty regularly between a high value and a low value (see the image to the right). This means this effect could be used to warm and cool an array of things periodically. Could there be some engineering use of this?

Online Energy2D simulations

Energy2D is our signature software for simulating heat transfer and fluid dynamics. Fifty online simulations are now available to the world through Energy2D's website. These simulations run speedily on most computers, bringing a vivid, colorful world of science to your computer screen and allowing you to experiment with them.

All these simulations can be downloaded for editing, provided that you have also installed the standalone Energy2D software on your computer (you don't need it to run the online simulations--only when you need to edit or create a simulation will you need to install it). The editing interface still has limited functionalities, but we are hoping to make it ten times better in the future.

One of our next steps is to make a version that runs on Android. This will allow the simulations you have created to run on tablets and smartphones as well. Work is also underway to include other energy flows and transformations to enrich the natural phenomena it can simulate, and to integrate data from sensors to enable richer user interfaces.

The National Science Foundation provides the funding to make this possible.

Energy2D is our signature software for simulating invisible energy flow in natural and man-made systems. One of its view shows the temperature distribution calculated by the physics engine. This view renders images similar to what an infrared camera shows. Most IR cameras have a few color palettes for the user to choose. So I think we should provide those options in Energy2D, too.

This blog post shows the three color palettes commonly used in IR imagery that were implemented in Energy2D: rainbow, iron, and gray. I guess the IR folks call the second one "iron" because it looks like the color of an iron bar heated to glow.


A criticism of using colorful heat maps to visualize distributions is the possibility of twisting data and therefore creating illusions--because our perception of color does not go linearly with the linear increase of the RGB values. You can compare these three images and see if that is a problem.

I have blogged a lot about how great an inquiry tool IR imaging represents. The resemblance of Energy2D's temperature patterns to IR images indicates a learning possibility of using simulations to deliver some of the nice features that an IR camera gives--before the prices of IR cameras come down to a couple of hundred dollars.


If you would like to show how they look in real simulations, go to Energy2D's home page and explore from there.

The following are two Energy2D simulations that compare convection and conduction, which should run within this page if you have installed Java and Java applets are enabled with your browser. The first one shows the case of natural convection. The second one shows the case of forced convection.

Instruction: Click inside a simulation window. Press 'R' to  start or stop, 'T' to reset, 'L' to reload the initial configurations, and 'G' to open or close a graph. The virtual temperature sensors can be moved around, though most other pieces are locked to their positions. Right-click on the windows for more actions.

Natural convection (driven by thermal buoyancy):

Forced convection (driven by airflow):

A Von Kármán vortex street.

The following screenshot shows a typical Von Kármán vortex street produced from the second simulation. Energy2D is also capable of producing other interesting fluid patterns such as mushroom clouds, Bernard's Cell, and the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability.

More generally, Energy2D is a Java application that allows users to create interactive, real-time simulations of heat and mass flow. A simulation you create can be easily placed on the Internet just like what you saw above.

On a separate note, below are two results for conduction simulations using Energy2D that illustrate the circuit analogy: Ohm's Law is the electrical analogy of Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction. It is interesting to note that Ohm actually drew considerable inspiration from Fourier's work on heat conduction in the theoretical explanation of his work (see Ohm's Law in Wikipedia). Ironically, today's students seem to be more familiar with Ohm's Law than Fourier's Law. So the circuit analogy is used in textbooks to help students understand heat conduction.

The analogy to a parallel circuit.

The analogy to a series circuit.