Outlook

The following aspects are still under development and some of them require further discussion. So, everybody is invited to help us with personal suggestions:

	Improved flow solvers
	Availability
	Participation
	Visualization techniques
	Concepts in 3D

Don't forget what you see here is still one of the first (!) official versions (v2.0) of our "Virtual Album of Fluid Motion". Many of the presented examples cannot be rigorously verified, particularly in a quantitative manner. Nevertheless, from our numerical experience over the last years (see the "Mathematical Motivation" in the Chapter Motivation) we believe that all included flow simulations show the right qualitative behaviour, but still.... The question for the "quantitative quality" of the shown simulations remains a delicate one as long as sharp a-posteriori error control is not (yet) available, or until someone else (or many) obtain the same results. Therefore, we hope that the presented flow simulations stimulate to make computations for similar configurations!

Anyway, we hope you have enjoyed the Virtual Album, and we are thankful for all further suggestions!!!

Improved flow solvers

In the near future we expect a significant improvement of the flow solver FEATFLOW due to our new FEM basic package FEAST. The resulting code will be able to exploit the new hardware features of modern processors while improving at the same time the numerical features of the performed multigrid tools. Additionally, parallelism and adaptivity are directly included in the data and solver structure of FEAST. This step will allow us to proceed with the 3D simulations. Look at the corresponding papers in our "Paper Archive"! In addition, the "last" FEATFLOW version (v1.3) which is based on the older FEAT packages, will be published in summer 2002. So, watch the FEATFLOW homepage.

Availability

All the FEAT/FEAST and FEATFLOW packages are available under the "Open Source" license, and we will keep it that way in future, too. So, you can be sure to always being able to get the latest releases of the Virtual Album and of the FEATFLOW software with corresponding sources and documentation also in future!

Participation

The underlying FEATFLOW software is completely free and we invite everybody to participate at the Virtual Album with suggestions for interesting flow configurations or even with complete flow simulations! So, feel free to work with us as "FEATFLOW Fellow".

Visualization techniques

We are currently examining other flow representation tools and new numerical concepts for digital image processing. However, at the moment it is not clear to us which of these tools can be "easily" (!!!) applied in the automatic generation of flow movies. Research is going on!

Concepts in 3D

The field of 3D flow simulations is still a "grand challenging problem". First of all, most available solvers are clearly not able - because of performance and accuracy reasons - to simulate complex nonstationary flows in reasonable time! Additionally, in contrast to the 2D case, the flow representation (cutplanes for velocity and pressure, streamfunction, etc.) and particularly the choice of the "storage medium" is still unclear. At the moment, we can offer three possibilties which are already partially realized in this Virtual Album:

• All "solution data" is available on a server and the user can interactively play around with the kind of flow representation and different viewpoints (large compute and storage requirements <--> complete information).
• The Virtual Album provides different specific flow representations (as in 2D), and the user can interactively play with different viewpoints (medium storage requirements <--> restricted (?) information, for instance via VRML).
• Again, the Virtual Album provides different specific flow representations and viewpoints (as in 2D), and the user can download the prepared MPEG videos only (low storage requirements <--> little (?) information).