Autodesk Labs: Project Falcon for Revit Air Flow CFD Overview

Project Falcon is a free technology preview that simulates air flow around vehicles, buildings, outdoor equipment, consumer products, or other objects of your choosing in a virtual wind tunnel. Falcon technology is extremely geometry tolerant and easy to use, enabling you to begin seeing and understanding air flow behavior within seconds of starting the application. Results update almost in real-time in response to changes in wind-direction and speed that you specify. Visualization tools available within the Falcon family of applications include 2D and 3D flow lines, shaded result planes, vector plots, and surface pressure shading. Quantified outputs include velocity, pressure, drag force, and drag coefficient.

See http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/fa... for more information.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Vitaliy Snitovets]

useless

[Autodesk]

Could you be more specific? Technology previews are intended to get feedback, so you may be right, buut ee have no way to know unless you tell us.

[Afireinthesun]

There is no way of saving a simulation for future use that I can find (e.g. the Domain Size resets EVERY time) - how can a user save their settings for easy re-use? The implementation of the laminar flow in Autocad and Inventor makes sense (and indeed the whole technology makes sense in these programs but so far not in Revit), at least you can get some gut feeling for turbulence and deadspots for circulation - this is missing in Revit and would perhaps make the tool properly useful.

[Afireinthesun]

I know that this is a technology preview but apart from the ability to make nice animations, how is this of any practical use? Every Revit demo' illustrates a cluster of buildings and the movement of air and pressure on the buildings. They all suffer from the same problem as there is no quantifiable starting point to indicate what the data means and there is no attempt to show a quantifiable or meaningful improvement in the design. Please post an actual real-life application for this technology.

[Emmanuel Maenda]

I think this is fantastic..making Revit more and more useful and more complex by the years..but its good stuff

[Harvick T]

Its not useless, I use the stand alone version all the time to conduct CFD images for my aircraft designs, very useful for locating drags and stress points as well as studying airflow. The things i dont like about it is the lack of options for FOV, inputs for dimension, and controls for viewing