I was digging through an old hard drive and found something that made me smile. It was a GIF animation that I created 20 years ago (give or take a few weeks). No, not something with the qualities to go viral. This was the continuation of simulation work that I did for my PhD thesis.
My primary goal was to publish a paper in a good journal. The trouble with Computational Fluid Dynamics is the results are (obviously) not static. A single graph or image does not say much. I needed to explain how a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability was created, and I needed to convey how a supposedly quiescent sedimentation process could produce intense mixing. I also wanted something that looked cool. The GIF animation was a great tool to visualize the results.
I was overjoyed with the results. The wavelength of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability matched experimental work. Doubling the resolution of the simulation produced the same wavelength, only with more defined features. This is what a good result looks like.
The paper was not accepted, and that was OK. I learned a lot in the process.
And I still get a smile when I look at these old results.
