Image and Practice: Visualization in Computational Fluid Dynamics Research

Abstract

In this study I examine the use of visualization within everyday research practices in computational physics. In doing so, I attempt to move from the well documented representational issues elicited by the concept of the image, to more microscale issues of the habitual structuring of the everyday that emerge when a specific example of science in the making is analysed. To this end, I focus on one specific example, of tracing a computational error through a fluid dynamics simulation of the 'lock exchange' experiment. This simulation is one small part of the research that goes on within one of Europe's largest computational physics research groups, the Applied Modelling and Computation Group at Imperial College in London, where I am involved in ongoing ethnographic fieldwork research. Visualization is shown to play a central role, not just in daily routines of investigation and problem solving, but in the process of habituation through which scientists cultivate the dispositions through which everyday life gains its texture and form. Far from being a detachable representation of a part of a world, simulation is shown to come into being as a process within a world structured by the repetitions and improvizations that characterize research practice.

Programming Visuals, Visualising Programs

“…Our attention to the visual features of computation reflects a growing interest in how scientists engage with visualisations (Amann and Knorr Cetina, 1990;Burri and Dumit, 2008;Carusi et al, 2010;Lynch, 2011;Messeri, 2017). Our work is aligned with studies exploring the material work of dealing with digital images and visual data in scientific research (Alač, 2011;Carusi, 2008Carusi, , 2011Coopmans, 2006Coopmans, , 2011Daipha, 2010;Hoeppe, 2012Hoeppe, , 2014Sormani, 2014;Spencer, 2012;Vertesi, 2012). 1 We focus on the practices involved in visualisation-based and visually-oriented research work, and how those practices intertwine with the wider scientific knowledge and context of that work.…”

The difference a method makes: methods as epistemic objects in computational science

“…A surprise such as this steadiness of the result, is routinely treated as a sign of equipment malfunction (Spencer 2012), but once reasons are found to take it as an event pertaining to the object, it opened the door to a surprisingly neat mathematical treatment. Surprising because as CE put it "all the most famous proofs of this kind of thing are very difficult and involve a sequence of about fourteen inequalities," but in this case, via a back and forth movement between computational testing and paper proof, he discovered a much neater proof of the general properties of the discretisation scheme, showing its properties make a difference precisely in the kinds of problem that crop up in geophysical applications, thus concretizing the new scheme in the toolbox of Fluidity, FEM and CFD more generally.…”