CFD Visualization in a Virtual Reality Environment Using Building Information Modeling Tools

Abstract

Scientific visualization has been an essential process in the engineering field, enabling the tracking of large-scale simulation data and providing intuitive and comprehendible graphs and models that display useful data. For computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data, the need for scientific visualization is even more important given the complicated spatial data structure and large quantities of data points characteristic of CFD data. To better take advantage of CFD results for buildings, the potential use of virtual reality (VR) techniques cannot be overlooked in the development of building projects. However, the workflow required to bring CFD simulation results to VR has not been streamlined. Building information modeling (BIM) as a lifecycle tool for buildings includes as much information as possible for further applications. To this end, this study brings CFD visualization to VR using BIM tools and reports the evaluation and analysis of the results.