Web enabling - examples

The traveling chemical engineer problem

Imagine a chemical engineer working at a chemical plant in Spain (or any other country). The engineer is dissatisfied with the performance of one of his chemical reactors (energy consuption, side products ...) and suspects this has to do with the materials streams in the reactor. Therefore he contacts a CFD-specialist at the Central Research Lab in Norway (or any other country). He flies to Norway and meets his colleague, showing him the drawings of the reactor. The CFD-specialist promises to perform some calculations, and the chemical engineer flies back to Spain, with some hope this highly-paid specialist will solve his problem.

The CFD-specialist makes a construction of the reactor in the computer, and starts a number of (CPU-expensive) calculations on his expensive supercomputer. Two weeks later he can announce to the chemical engineer that he got some first results.

"Please show these results to me", says the engineer, calling from Spain, "I am very interested !".
"Well, I can send or e-mail you some GIF-pictures" answers the CFD specialist, "but if you want to see the results in 3D, you better travel to Norway, as this requires an SGI workstation".
"Well, we have an SGI workstation here, can't I see the results without having to travel ?".
"Only if you have this $50,000 a year licensed CFD package", replies the CFD specialist.
"OK, traveling to Norway costs me less than buying such an expensive computer program, but send me the GIF-file anyway" answers the chemical engineer, and a few days later, he flies to Norway again.

So they meet again in Norway, and soon find out that something is wrong.
"The twist angle between these 2 plates is not 15° , but 35° " says the chemical engineer. They have a look again at the drawings, and see that it is indeed 35°, but the ink was not so good anymore, and one can also easily interprete the number as being 15.
"XXXX", says the CFD specialist, "I have to do all the calculations over again !".
So, the chemical engineer travels back to Spain, being very unhappy.

Here is the GIF-file the CFD specialist had send to the chemical engineer



Would you have seen that the twist angle is wrong ?

Now lets take another approach, the web-enabled approach: the CFD specialist has a project website with a database, on which he keeps all results. The project website also contains the 3D-images of the CFD-results, and the chemical engineer can follow the advances in the project from day to day through the website, without having to travel, and only requiring a web-browser on his local PC (or SGI workstation, or any low-cost web terminal connected to the company's intranet).

The VRML takes about 30 seconds to load on an Intranet, but may require several minutes when using a (slow) telephone line. It requires a VRML plugin such as Cortona, or Cosmo Player.