Real-time solar turbulence simulation
 

Dear forum members,

I am an artist who makes large interactive installations in collaboration with engineers, you can see examples of my work at
http://www.lozano-hemmer.com

We have hardly worked with fluid dynamics in the past but now I am preparing a project that will simulate a 60ft sun over the city. For this project we will need a real-time software simulator to beam images to a tethered cold-air aerostat. You can see high resolution mock-ups here
http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/prod/navier_stokes/

What I am after is to implement Navier-Stokes, reaction diffusion and/or other equations in a piece of software that allows me to simulate in real time the turbulence, flares, dark spots, etc that are seen on the sun. By real time I mean 15 fps at XGA resolution that is constantly and unpredictably changing, i.e. no looping pre-rendered sequences. As this is art, the software needs not to be accurate :-) I thought I'd ask if there is anyone already doing something like this or there are any pointers to maths, existing code or existing software that could help.

Thanks!

Rafael

sorry the link for the mock-ups was down, it is now up

very nice!
 

I have no immediate suggestions for your inquiry, but I must say your mock-up looks really cool!

thanks! and we are uploading new ones :-)

Hi I'm updating my own thread in case it is of interest.

We found this for navier stokes
http://www.win.tue.nl/~mwestenb/edu/...ent/smoke.html
and this for reaction diffusion
http://www.joakimlinde.se/java/React...sion/index.php
http://zool33.uni-graz.at/schmickl/m...diffusion.html

we are mixing them up to get our solar surface simulator, but let me know if you have insights on better ways to visualize this, especially if these other ways are "astronomically correct" i.e. produce effects we see on the sun eg. spots, flares, etc.

best,

Rafael