Cool Stuff I Made

Interactive visualizations and simulations from engineering projects. The solid at right turns under the drawing convention of the whole site — click it.

Fig. — Duodecedron planus solidus 12 · pentagona · φ

How long until the pizza is ready to eat?

CFD study · OpenFOAM · Fluid Mechanics I

Pizza cooling CFD visualization

A pizza comes out of the oven at 90 °C. How long until it cools to 60 °C — ready to eat — and does it matter whether you leave it on the counter (20 °C) or stick it in the fridge (5 °C)? On a rack or on a plate? I simulated all eight combinations (counter/fridge × rack/plate × with/without thermal radiation) as 2D buoyant-flow cases in OpenFOAM and built this visualization from the resulting temperature fields.

The verdict: fridge + rack + radiation gets you eating in about 8.5 minutes, while a pizza on a plate at room temperature still wasn't at 60 °C when the 25-minute simulation ended. The rack wins because the buoyant plume can pull cool air past the underside; radiation turns out to matter a lot, roughly halving the cooling times.

Stress State Visualizer

Interactive 3D · three.js · Solid Mechanics

Type in the six components of a stress tensor and watch the 3D stress state at a point come alive: the stress cube, principal stresses and their directions, octahedral planes, Mohr's three circles, invariants, the deviatoric tensor, and the von Mises and Tresca yield criteria — all updating live. You can also probe the traction on any plane by pointing its normal. I built it because rotating a stress cube in your head during a Solid Mechanics exam is exactly as hard as it sounds.

N · V · M Diagrams

Internal forces in beams · Solid Mechanics

An interactive beam calculator: choose the supports, set the geometry and loads, and it draws the axial force (N), shear force (V) and bending moment (M) diagrams, with support reactions and a cut section you can slide along the beam to see the internal forces at any point.

Stress distribution in a beam cross-section Cross-section warping visualization

The renders above go one level deeper, from internal forces to stresses. On the left, how the bending moment and shear force of a simply supported beam distribute across a rectangular cross-section: normal stress linear in height (σ = My/I), shear stress parabolic (τ = VQ/Ib). On the right, St. Venant torsion warping — a circular section stays plane under torsion, but a square one warps out of its own plane.

Rocket Flight Simulation

3DOF / 6DOF flight dynamics · Python · INVICTUS II

3DOF rocket trajectory simulation

Flight simulation work for INVICTUS II, our student rocket for EuRoC. RocketPy 6DOF simulations verify the launch requirements before anything flies: rail-exit velocity of 32.8 m/s (the competition requires 30), a predicted apogee of about 3 150 m AGL against the 3 000 m target, and a stability margin that stays close to 3.9 calibers through the burn. The plot above is from Flight Forge, a lighter 3DOF simulator we wrote for the early design phase, when you don't yet know the inertia tensor but still need fast answers on apogee, rail-exit speed and parachute descent rates. Rounding it out, OpenFOAM CFD runs of the airframe at 30–240 m/s feed the drag data.