Design of Real-Time Browser-Based Platform for Thermohydraulic Characterization of a Laboratory Heat Exchanger Using PolyVR

This paper presents a real-time browser-based platform for thermohydraulic characteriza-
tion of a compact laboratory heating system, developed using the PolyVR research-grade
virtual reality engine. Experimental measurements are retrieved at 1 Hz from a cloud-based
database and processed via browser-native computational framework that continuously
performs thermophysical modeling, hydraulic analysis and energy balance evaluation. The
system calculates the rate of heat transfer (h), overall heat transfer coefficient (U), dimen-
sionless numbers (Re, Pr, Gr, Nu), pump performance, heater efficiency and cumulative
thermal energy. PolyVR provides the immersive environment in which the partial digital
twin functionality is integrated alongside the browser-based thermohydraulic calculations.
The whole system includes support for animations regarding flow diagrams, valve state
indicators, thermal field visualization and manipulation of system elements. The system
architecture is designed to work on desktops, head-mounted devices, as well as in CAVE
(cave automatic virtual environment) systems with remote connection made possible via
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using ngrok tunnels. The experiments were separated into three categories (steady-state,
dynamic and validation). Steady-state and dynamic datasets show that the browser com-
putation with PolyVR achieves high-fidelity thermohydraulic analysis similar to that done
in laboratory settings. The steady-state and transient datasets illustrate that browser-based
computation provides highly accurate thermohydraulic simulation close to that of the
laboratory reference computations. For all experiments performed on the platform, the
deviation of measurements does not exceed ±0.5 K in temperature, ±5% in flow rate and
±1% in pressure. The energy balance is closed with a deviation of ±2–3%.