Virtual Physics Laboratory

    At the U.P.C.'s Physics and Nuclear Engineering department (F.E.N.) some years ago appeared the idea of making a virtual laboratory in Internet. This idea has become a serious project and some applications have been developed and are availabe from this department's web. Those applications are designed to be used in teaching because they can help students to learn and understand some fields in Physics.

    This project tries to study the electromagnetic waves propagation through a rectangular waveguide. The laboratory shows the graphic representation of waves in a rectangular waveguide in all posible modes TE and TM.  There also exists the option of simulating the electric field lines in a particle set in 2D as well as in 3D.

    To obtain the best observation of results, the laboratory allows the navigation in 3D in the virtual scene where the simulation has been done. This navigation is basically composed by camera movings round de scene's center and the possibility of making zooms, all of this in real time.

    Moreover the application can print the graphic results of simulation and also is able to save an load files later from the hard disk drive with the particles fields created by user.

    The development of this application has been done with JAVA, because until now is the only one language that allows runing in different machines and operating systems. This is the reason for using JAVA in most applications in Internet.

    The application is composed by a web and by an applet that implements the simulations as well as the 3D navigator, used to inspect their graphic results.

    The time is the price we have to pay for using this tecnology. JAVA is an interpreted language   and this causes a low speed executing algorithms written with it. Moreover being an intensive calculation application, is highly recommendable to use a computer as fast as posible.