A physics laboratory you can change
Change a geometry, a material or a boundary condition, press Run, and watch how the field responds. Every experiment really runs: there is a solver behind it, not a recorded animation.
Note. The simulations are demonstrative and educational. They are not a substitute for professional engineering verification.
Experiments
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Available
Wind tunnel
Potential flow around an airfoil. Drag the control points, or set camber, thickness and angle of attack, and watch how the streamlines and the speed redistribute themselves.
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In preparation
Magnetics lab
The cross-section of a solenoid: an iron core, current-carrying windings, and the magnetic flux concentrating where the permeability is high.
The solver already exists in Fenix Spoon; the teaching page does not.
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In preparation
Heat sink
Conduction through a finned body with convective exchange at its surfaces: how many fins actually help, and when they stop helping.
Waiting on a dedicated adapter in the lab.
Two ways to compute the same thing
The same problem can be solved quickly and approximately, or slowly and more faithfully. The lab offers both routes and always tells you which one you are looking at — because the difference between them is part of what there is to learn.
Preview Fast preview
- A regular Cartesian grid, solved in NumPy.
- Near-instant response: ideal while you are reshaping the profile.
- Approximate by construction — the grid does not follow the body's outline.
FEniCSx FEniCSx computation
- An unstructured triangular mesh generated with Gmsh.
- P1 finite elements: slower, more faithful close to the profile.
- Produces a downloadable VTK file that opens in ParaView.
Checking what is installed on this server…
How it is made
The lab is an application built on Fenix Spoon, an open-source toolkit that puts a finite-element solver behind a web page: the protocol, the job handling, the solvers and the browser widgets all come from there. What you find here is the teaching experience built on top — the texts, the experiments, the design and the public deployment.
The code for this lab is on GitHub under the MIT licence. The real computations are carried out by FEniCSx.