Autodesk Flow Design the Easiest CFD Program Ever

At an Autodesk press event for another purpose (see Autodesk Buys..NEi Nastran...), it was Flow Design that stole the show.

CFD has never been so easy. Watch airflow separation increase with speed over the back of a Porche in this YouTube video of Project Falcon, now available as Audodesk Flow Design.

Announced last January with little fanfare (Flow was mentioned in an Autodesk blog post in January, and then picked up the same day in TenLinks Daily), there never an official press release, no phone calls or webinars for the media. Even Autodesk's own product site does not do it justice. Just another Autodesk Labs product done good.

The existence of a bona fide CFD (computer fluid dynamics) program for wind-tunnel simulation -- push-button easy and available at a rock-bottom price -- dropped like a bomb in the room of industry analysts and journalists. Our existence depends on knowing everything, but, well, we got caught flat-footed. A possible game changer, and we missed it!

How Much?

The fact that it is available for a steal, $210 a year, was by itself a shocker. One industry analyst remarked that a low price reflects badly on the product. After all, a competitor’s product sells for $80,000. At 0.25% of the price, no one was going to take Flow seriously.

History

Based on CFD technology from the Blue Ridge Numerics acquisition, Autodesk’s easy flow simulation was first shown at Autodesk Labs under the name of Project Falcon, back in September, 2012. Today, Autodesk demonstrates the technology in its Gallery on San Francisco's Market Street. There you stand in front of a Xbox Kinect scanner, push a button, and in a few seconds, it shows you your 2D profile with colored streamlines moving over it -- for what that's worth.

A little more useful demo was when they had a bicycle where you could hone your aero tuck. (See this YouTube video.) Most of a bike rider’s energy on level ground is spent overcoming air resistance.

One Trick Pony

But I digress. Did I remember to say it takes only seconds to solve problems? 

More importantly, it takes no time to set up. Flow takes shapes from a variety of objects, photographs, drawings, scans. If you are used to constructing a mesh of volume elements painstakingly, you now have a lot more time on your hands; with the speed and simplicity of Flow, you might consider a hobby -- or retirement, because you might be out of a job.

Oops: I got a bit carried away. Flow is not a full-fledged CFD code. It handles only wind tunnels. And it makes a lot of assumptions. While air speed can be adjusted, an arbitrary speed is assigned initially.

But supersonic flow? Careful boundary layer planning? I don't think so. Coupled heat transfer? Combustion? Nope. I guess some of you CFD eggheads can keep your jobs.

Get Ready to Justify Your CFD Program

But if you just got your boss to sign a purchase order for a new multiuser license for Fluent, Exa, COMSOL, and the like for who knows how many tens of thousands of dollars or Euros, you better have some pretty good answers as to just how is your favorite software so much better as he shows you what he can do on with Flow on his laptop. 

Not Just for Planes and Autos

 
How would a new structure affect wind patterns in London's financial district? Even architects can now use CFD to find out.

The simulation group at Autodesk is keen on making Flow Design available not just to traditional users (mainly in aerospace and automotive) but also to other industries that Autodesk serves. Architects, not typically CFD users, and certainly not mandated to use high-end simulation software in school or in practice, would now be able to easily run air flow studies, such as the effect of wind around a new high rise.

See Also

Project Falcon Graduates from Autodesk Labs to Autodesk Flow Design - announcement that Flow was now a commercial Autodesk product, Scott Sheppard, It's Alive in the Lab, Jan 15, 2014

Flow Design - Autodesk product site

 

Comments

[CFD Beast]

AutoDesk is NOT, repeat NOT a CFD company. They have no magic or special power to render fluid flow in all its complexity in seconds while companies that have done this for decades still take hours.

It's true that the traditional CFD vendors really should make it easy to input 3D data into their software from many sources, but this is really the easy part. The hard part is being able to set the conditions for the solver so that it gives a solution that matches with experimental data which requires a seasoned fluid mechanics expert who understands both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of both laminar and turbulent flow, compressible vs. incompressible, and so on.

Anyone who would trust AutoDesk (ahem) CFD software results as anything other than a very rough idealized and highly simplified view of what is happening for real-world product design or mission-critical work is a serious dweeb. Beyond the "oh wow that's cool" factor, for all but the simplest flows, this software is little more than art masquerading as engineering.

[ks-cad.com]

All software producers made software simpler with each new version. It's good because simpler interface make faster results. Software producer use well known simulation engines and connect with their software. Very good step to make good calculation.

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http://www.ks-cad.com