The event, which was the third annual installment of the competition, was organised by the university’s ITS Research Computing Department to increase awareness about the benefits of visualisation among research and teaching communities.

The first place was awarded to Dr Reza Sadr, TAMUQ assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Dr Rana Khader, mechanical engineering research assistant, for their team’s project, ‘Near-wall Effects on Nano- Particle Motion in a Microfluidics System.’ Dr Annie Ruimi, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and her team’s ‘3D Visualisation of Looping, Tangling and Knot Formation of Surgical Threads’ won the second spot.

Speaking about the subject of his winning project, Sadr said, “Nanotechnology has become very important in this century, as it can improve efficiency of engineering systems for electronics, medicine and energy applications.

Microfluidics has become important over the past decade to address the demand for efficiency in a wide range of applications in advanced systems, such as ink-jet printers, medical implants for injection of drugs and lab-on-a-chip devices.

In this work, computer simulation and 3D visualisation are used to show particle motion and the visualisation aims to allow the viewer to go into the nano scale and become part of the flow.

This work can help illustrate the real motion of nano particles for students in Physics and thermodynamics classrooms.” Explaining the competition’s process, Director of Research Computing at TAMUQ, Dr Othmane Bouhali said, “VDC received 13 proposals outlining the project’s goal, research and/or teaching benefits and type of support needed.

Competition participants included Qatar Museum Authority and Birmingham University, Qatar Statistics Authority and Qatar University, Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, and Texas A&M at Qatar.” The four groups worked for 13 weeks with Texas A&M’s visualisation experts to achieve their project goals and bring their projects to life with the 3D technology.

The projects were later presented to the VDC 11 selection committee composed of members representing RasGas, Roger Head and Ahmed Zamri; Northwestern University in Qatar, Dr Muqeem Khan and Texas A&M at Qatar, Dr Hamid Parsaei.

TAMUQ Dean and CEO, Dr Mark H Weichold said, “Texas A&M at Qatar is proud to support scholarly activities that use cutting-edge visualisation technology.

These tools support our teaching, research and day-to-day operations in the university, as well as allow us to utilise the data we carefully collect and compile.

The 13 proposals we received for this year’s competition prompted us to think about new and novel applications of visualisation technology for nanotechnology and medicine, among other uses.

“It also gives us a new perspective on the knowledge we pursue and discover.

It is encouraging that visualisation technology is becoming a staple for research.

We know of proposals submitted in NPRP Cycle 4 that rely on visualization.

It is clear that Texas A&M at Qatar and its visualisation technology are a valuable resource.” The event provided an opportunity for the various communities to utilise the university’s Immersive Visualisation Facility (IVF) or ‘Cave’, a complete visualisation environment for running and viewing complex graphical applications which allows the researcher to see and manipulate data in immersive 3D detail.

It is one of the few facilities of its kind in the region, offering researchers an opportunity to conduct ultramodernadvanced research.

Ruimi said, “It is exciting to be able to use such a unique facility that only a few researchers have access to.

The 3D visualisation capability the facility offers helped us capture important features of surgical thread such as looping and collapse and enabled us to predict the behaviour of surgical threads when subjected to conditions encountered during surgery.”

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