AMES, Iowa — A software package developed at the U.S. Department of Energy Ames Laboratory was recognized with an R&D 100 Award, an honor often referred to as the “Oscar of invention.”
The software, called osgBullet, combines detailed 3-D drawings and physics engines to create a virtual environment in which engineers can test their products, said lead scientist Mark Bryden.
Bryden, a professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State University, said the project has won three R&D 100 Awards over the past five years because of the potential it has for saving time and money in the world of engineering.
Today, most major engineering projects must go through five to seven intermediate testing stages before completion, Bryden said. In the case of a power plant, he said, those stages might include constructing tabletop models, a prototype and a pilot plant, before the final product.
OsgBullet could eliminate several of the prototype steps, Bryden said.
“Our goal is to make it so that there are very few things in the middle,” Bryden said. “You might build one or two physical prototypes, then convince yourself that you’ve done a good enough job on your virtual model that you’re able to then jump to the larger plant.”
Creating projects this way would save time and money, Bryden said. The benefits are already being seen in smaller projects.
One such project is funded by the Army and involves building large containers that can be pulled behind military trucks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using the software allowed the Army to eliminate two of its prototype phases in constructing the containers and saved more than $250,000.
Doug McCorkle, an associate scientist with the Ames Laboratory and ISU’s Virtual Reality Applications Center, demonstrated how these containers were designed, simply by dropping pre-constructed computer-aided design files into a virtual environment.
Once in place, these objects behaved just as the objects would on a real worksite. McCorkle demonstrated this by clicking on an object and dragging it toward a virtual tool chest, causing a crash that made the tool chest rock back and forth.
“If we were designing a power plant, we could actually walk around, run into pipes, walk up stairs or reach out and turn a valve,” McCorkle said.
The software works in coordination with ISU’s C6 virtual reality theater, which allows designers to interact with their projects much like they would with a physical prototype.
Although the software sounds like something from a video game, Bryden said it is much more practical and tailored to professional engineers. However, many of the philosophies behind the software can be found in video games, he said.
“You really do want to do engineering like you would do a game; you want to try things out and see what happens, then play it again,” Bryden said.
Being able to play these “what-if” games in real time is the major application of the software, Bryden said, and he hopes that the software continues to gain recognition and use by engineers.
The software is available for download on Google Code. Bryden said it has already been downloaded more than 500 times over the past few months since it was introduced.
“We’re really trying to get beyond this early adoption, to a place where we start seeing it take off, and R&D 100 Awards are good for that,” Bryden said.
The software has a long way to go before it will be able to handle large projects like power plants, Bryden said, but he is hopeful that those sorts of projects will be possible in five to 10 years.
“This is a necessary and essential step, but it’s not the final step,” Bryden said. “You’ll be hearing more from us.”
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