Collaborative Visualization System for Comb-Drive MEMS Modeling and Simulation

Abstract

Data analysis and interactive visualization play critical roles in the scientific process, and sometimes real time computation results are very important to scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, these tasks are often performed only as a post-processing step after a large-scale batch job. This paper introduces a concept of collaborative visualization technique for coupled-domain problems with application to comb-drive Micro-Electronic-Mechanic-System (MEMS) modeling and simulation. A newly developed collaborative visualization (CV) system was used to investigate the effectiveness of MEMS design associated with Pyramid type data structure obtained from Finite Element Method (FEM) based simulation. The CV system combines high performance computing and collaborative visualization techniques to analyze engineering problems with multi-users through networks or the Internet concurrently, but at different locations. The case study problem, comb-drive MEMS, presents a computation model with different aspects from computation results analyzed by a group of scientists and engineers across a network or global Internet.