Over the past several years, I have observed both a reduction in the number of practical laboratory classes that undergraduate engineering students are expected to take, and a tendency for those that remain to be overly prescriptive. Both of these factors can be traced back to an increase in student numbers and a need to ensure that laboratory activities can be completed efficient and safely. The downside to this is that these laboratories can become activities in which participants collect data in autopilot, without thinking about what they are measuring and why that particular instrument is being used or why the measurement is occurring in that location. Students can learn from processing the data they collect in this fashion, but does it really prepare them to set up their own experiments or make an assessment of an equivalent machine in an industrial environment?
Imagine if student’s had to determine how they would assess the performance of say a gas turbine.
How would they determine the thrust?
Where would you measure the pressure and temperature?
What about the fuel flow rate?
Surely this would be a far more interesting and valuable experience and one that would come closer to encourage the level of critical thinking that we want in our future graduates. I’d much as we’d like to, the fact is we do not have the space, technical support or time to allow an entire 1st or 2nd year class to design an experiment, and instrument, a complex piece of machinery like a gas turbine engine. Not to mention the potential OHS incident that might occur. We can, however, do this virtually.
This was the emphasis behind a Final Year project, undertaken by Mr Keith Lai, in the final year of his Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) in 2018. The idea at that time was to build a virtual experience that could be used to act as both a teaching aid and a virtual laboratory experience that would not only help given students and appreciation of the basic mechanics and thermodynamics of a gas turbine engine, but could also be used to a platform from which students could freely draw data to analyse the performance of the engine. To do this a basic mathematical model was built to present the process through the fan, compressor stages, combusters, turbine stages and propulsive nozzle. Isentropic and combustion efficiency were estimated based on existing literature such that a realistic performance could be modelled. All that remained was to build it.
Fortunately I’d had some experience from a collaboration with colleagues from the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University (Immersive isosurface visualisation for engineering datasets) of using Virtual Reality (VR) for visualisation of data from direct numerical simulations of turbulent flows, and had spent time building my own VR experience for promoting various aspects of fluid mechanics. When the time came to build the model, Unity game engine seemed the perfect place for Keith to start.
The initial version of this simulation was envisioned as a smartphone based Augmented Reality tool, but that of course meant ensuring everything worked on both iOS and Android. Unity was able to handle both workflows, but we also had to ensure it worked as well on a budget 3-5 year old phone and not just the latest greatest model. Fortunately, the project showed enough promise that I was able to secure some funding to keep Keith on to develop the software further, which included transitioning to a WebGL version that could be offered to students as a more uniform experience with less overhead for a single developer to manage and debug. A sample demonstration of this is included in the video below.
There is always more to be added and improvements to be made, but I was pretty happy with where it ended up.