CompuServe Messages

Rich: I'm at Lewis, in the Processing Science and Technology Branch. We are most of the Materials Division's microgravity materials science effort. The branch includes the Microgravity Materials Science Lab and the Computational Materials Lab. I've been using 3DS to help with visualization on a couple of our projects. One of them is a prototype of a versatile modular furnace (the PMZF, or Programmable Multi-Zone Furnace). It is built from a number of nearly identical modules, each one being a furnace zone. I've done a couple of animations for PMZF that illustrate the modularity and the potential for easy (maybe even in-flight) repair. I've worked on animations for a couple of other projects, particularly ones that are hard to understand with a stack of flat paper drawings. Our labs get a lot of tour groups, and it seems like we are always uncompressing and running the visualization demos in our computational lab. We are in the middle of making up a "video tour" of the lab so our visitors can see what we've done without having a major impact on the machines in the lab. I might expand it to a full tour, including the experimental hardware in the MMSL, but that is a **LOT** of stuff to model… We got asked to help one of our users visualize the accelerometer data taken during his experiment runs on USML-1. Unfortunately, the experiments lasted most of 24 hours and took 3 channels of data at 12.5 HZ for the duration! Chris