User:Jesse Dinnat/sandbox

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Virtual engineering


 * User-centered virtual reality visualization techniques. When presented in a familiar and natural interface, complex three-dimensional data becomes more understandable and usable, enhancing the user's understanding. Coupled with an appropriate expert (e.g., a design engineer, a plant engineer, or a construction manager), virtual reality can reduce design time for better solutions.
 * Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) Computer-aided manufacturing Interactive analysis and engineering. Today nearly all aspects of power plant simulation require extensive off-line setup, calculation, and iteration. The time required for each iteration can range from one day to several weeks. Tools for interactive collaborative engineering in which the engineer can establish a dynamic thinking process are needed to permit real-time exploration of the “what-if” questions that are essential to the engineering process. In nearly all circumstances, an engineering answer now has much greater value than an answer tomorrow, next week, or next month. Although many excellent engineering analysis techniques have been developed, they are not routinely used as a fundamental part of engineering design, operations, control, and maintenance. The time required to set up, compute, and understand the result, then repeat the process until an adequate answer is obtained, significantly exceeds the time available. This includes techniques such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite elements analysis (FEA), and optimization of complex systems. Instead, these engineering tools are used to provide limited insight to the problem, to sharpen an answer, or to understand what went wrong after a bad design and how to improve the results next time. This is particularly true of CFD analysis.
 * Computer-aided engineering (CAE): Integration of real processes into the virtual environment. Engineering is more than analysis and design. A methodology for storage and rapid access to engineering analyses, plant data, geometry, and all other qualitative and quantitative engineering data related to plant operation still needs to be developed.
 * Engineering decision support tools. Optimization, cost analysis, scheduling, and knowledge-based tools need to be integrated into the engineering processes.

Virtual engineering allows engineers to work with objects in a virtual space without having to think about the objects' underlying technical information. When an engineer takes hold of a virtual component and moves or alters it, he or she should only have to think about the consequences of such a move in the component's real world counterpart. Engineers must also be able to create a picture of the system, the various parts of the system, and how the parts will interact with each other. When engineers can focus on the making decisions for particular engineering issues rather than the underlying technical information, design cycles and costs are reduced.