3D Scientific Visualization of Wake Vortices using the Game Engine Unity3D

Abstract

As a consequence of lift, aircraft's wings generate a pair of counter rotating wake vortices that represent a serious risk for following airplanes. Nowadays separation time standards between consecutive aircrafts, significantly influence the air traffic control, often leading to delays and congestions, and consequentially to a drop of the airport capacity. Having a 3D representation of this aerodynamic effect based on a real time vortex prediction model, could be useful to improve the management of the air traffic control in a specified airport, without loosing any degree of security. Thanks to the big development of the gaming industry, high performing graphic hardware has been produced and, short time later, different companies decided to implement software tools to exploit as much as they could this new type of standalone graphic cards. In this way different Game Engines started to arouse, born with the purpose of helping programmers in the process of game developing. However considered the great potential of game engines, some researchers started testing if these frameworks could be used not just for gaming but also to develop scientific simulations. In our project we wanted to do exactly this, using a specific game engine, called Unity3D, to create the graphic visualization of the wake vortices, basing the simulation on real data developed by a mathematical model. In the following chapters we will discuss in details why we chose Unity3D, how we implemented the simulation, what other tools we used, what results we reached and which development prospects our application can have.