CFD Smoke Tunnel

A CAELIX scaffold experiment in carrier transport, thermal coupling, pressure signalling and passive spectral dye

Run Experiment

Open the live browser experiment as a single-run view.

What Is It?

This experiment is a coupled tunnel simulation with a moving triangular obstacle, D2Q9 lattice-Boltzmann carrier flow, thermal transport, pressure recovery, buoyancy feedback, balanced-medium relaxation and seven-channel passive dye visualisation.

It is visually dramatic, but its role in CAELIX is deliberately limited. The carrier stack is useful for transport, diagnostics and comparison. The passive dye is not CAELIX substrate content. It exists to make the wake visible.

What It Tests

The experiment tests how several carrier-side layers behave when coupled inside one browser-visible tunnel. A rotating solid obstacle launches wake structure, pressure transients, compression heating and medium response while dye traces the flow.

It is useful as a scaffold because it shows what a conventional carrier can do well, and where CAELIX must be stricter. D2Q9 flow and semi-Lagrangian dye are not the balanced-ternary substrate. They are machinery for comparison, visualisation and staged development.

How It Works

The authoritative transport layer is a D2Q9 lattice-Boltzmann carrier with tunnel inflow, outflow and moving-wall bounce-back around a triangular obstacle. Thermal transport is advected by the carrier, diffused and relaxed.

Compression heating is recovered from carrier divergence: convergence heats, expansion cools. Pressure is then reconstructed from density deviation and temperature contribution. Thermal buoyancy feeds back into the carrier as a vertical body force.

A balanced-medium relaxer tracks slow compression memory driven by carrier divergence. A separate pressure-wave layer launches telegraph transients from moving solid boundaries. Pressure and medium gradients can nudge the carrier velocity through auditable gains.

The final visible plume is produced by seven passive dye channels. Each channel performs a semi-Lagrangian backstep, optional diffusion and linear decay, then renders additively through a spectral colour palette.

Provenance Split

The thermal, pressure, buoyancy and balanced-medium pieces are CAELIX development scaffolds. They are part of the project’s carrier-side experimental infrastructure.

The passive dye is explicitly not CAELIX physics. It does not define the substrate, does not carry burden and does not participate in any balanced-ternary law. It is a visual tracer. Useful, but guilty until proven otherwise.

What Is Not Hard-Coded

No pre-rendered wake is used.
No dye path is manually drawn.
No pressure plume is painted into the renderer.
No balanced-ternary substrate claim is made for the passive dye.

The wake is produced by carrier transport and obstacle motion. The dye only reveals that transport.

Why It Matters

This experiment matters because it helps keep CAELIX honest about carriers. A lattice-Boltzmann tunnel can produce attractive, structured flow, but attractive flow is not automatically substrate physics.

For CAELIX, the smoke tunnel is a useful contrast case. It shows a strong conventional lattice carrier, gives the site a demanding visual benchmark and marks the boundary between helpful scaffold and claimed substrate law. That boundary is where most bad simulations quietly cheat. This one labels the machinery.