...as Virgin Racing found out the hard way.
An F1 rear wing is hard enough to model using full CFD, you're unlikely to find anything that'll give you an accurate flow.
Which part of "i'm not looking for a professional CFD that requires 3 million dollar computers and 2 days of rendering to produce a result" didn't you understand? :/
Just wanted to have a little fun at drawing different shapes and seeing how they behave, like that iThing app, thassal.
But why would anyone write software if they knew it would give wrong answers?
Ask Nick Wirth.
Wrong answers and approximate answers are not the same.
Aerodynamics doesn't really 'do' approximate. Tiny variations in the flow field can dramatically alter results, so something that's being done 'as a rough estimate' is usually just wrong rather than an approximation.
Aerodynamics doesn't really 'do' approximate. Tiny variations in the flow field can dramatically alter results, so something that's being done 'as a rough estimate' is usually just wrong rather than an approximation.
Oh for crying out loud.
I was just hoping for a software to do some drawings and say "oohh that's so cool, let me try this now", I'm not planning on making my own formula 1 car. And still, if I was, going by Virgin's example, CFD would not be my approach.
I can appreciate that, my point is not that such software shouldn't exist, merely that there's a reason it doesn't currently exist.
But it does, in the form of a simple app for the iPhone, which is what sparked my questioning, and I don't see why a bigger better version couldn't exist for desktop computers, specially with so much processing power in CPUs and specially GPUs we now have.
Because I think to be honest the developers of CFD software have a mental block against creating easier to use less accurate software. Not saying they should or shouldn't, but that's why there is none.