KelvinHelm

KelvinHelm is an open-source software project focused on the simulation and visualization of fluid dynamics, with a particular emphasis on phenomena related to shear instabilities such as the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. The project aims to provide accessible tooling for researchers, educators, and developers to build, simulate, and visualize fluid flows.

History and purpose: The project originated in 2018 as a collaboration between researchers and software engineers who sought an interoperable framework for comparing numerical methods. It has grown through community contributions and hosts tutorials, example datasets, and reference implementations for both two- and three-dimensional simulations. The name reflects the physical phenomena that often motivate investigation within the field.

Features and capabilities: KelvinHelm offers a modular solver core with support for multiple numerical methods, including finite-volume and particle-based approaches. It provides Python bindings for rapid experimentation and a cross-platform rendering module for real-time visualization. The project emphasizes reproducibility through example notebooks and a standardized dataset format, and it supports parallel computation to handle larger or more detailed simulations.

Usage and impact: KelvinHelm has been used in university courses, research projects, and prototyping workflows for engineering problems. It serves as a learning platform for fluid dynamics concepts and as a testbed for comparing numerical schemes. The community maintains documentation, tutorials, and example cases that cover common flow configurations, from simple shear layers to more complex multiphysics setups.

Governance and licensing: KelvinHelm is distributed under a permissive open-source license. It is maintained by a core team with a growing contributor community, with governance managed through a public repository, issue tracking, and regular releases.

See also: Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, fluid dynamics, open-source software, numerical simulation, visualization.