New Virtual Application for Improving the Students' Understanding of Ternary Phase Diagrams

Abstract

Students consider spatial visualization as one of the major difficulties at which they had to face in engineering studies. Most of them think that any effort leading to improve the understanding of such problem is welcomed. Taking this into account, an interactive application is developed in this paper in order to overcome the difficulties that engineering students traditionally find with regard to the visualization of ternary phase diagrams. To develop the didactic application diverse commercial software were used: (i) 3DStudioMax for designing the ternary equilibrium diagram and (ii) Quest3D for giving the tool a more intuitive and easy to use character. The result is a 3D virtual application which students can use for interacting in real time with a ternary diagram, e.g. changing point of view, rotating view, observing hidden zones of the diagram by applying transparency option, exploding view phases, cutting the diagram revealing isothermal sections and so on.