A Dow Chemical Company project, carried out by Dow's Kishore Kar, is producing a diaper design incorporating Drytech* superabsorbent polymer particles distributed in a fluff pad. The design was evaluated using a computer model run on NCSA's CRAY-2 system.
NCSA research programmer Michael McNeill visualized the results by using a high-performance Silicon Graphics Inc. workstation. A still from the visualization shows the computational grid that extends over a quarter of the diaper. Polymer particles are represented by spheres. The concentration of liquid and its motion, described as a function of time, are represented by the variation in color from violet to brown as well as the isometric surfaces. Numerical results, which were obtained at many timesteps, were converted to images and animated to view the time evolution of the process. The overall model was compared to a magnetic resonance imaging experiment, which provides a three-dimensional image of the water distribution in a diaper, and was shown to give comparable results to the final steady-state values.
This new way of visualizing diaper performance with HPCC techniques is facilitating the development process for improved disposable diapers.
More information about this project and other HPCC MetaCenter research efforts is available on the NCSA World Wide Web server.