Virtual Wind Tunnel (OpenFOAM)

While involved with designing and prototyping various ideas of mine (Most notably my Icarus Rocket) it became apparent that a virtual wind tunnel would be a very useful tool. There are very few products out there that I could find, but the best one seemed to be Autodesk Flow Design (Formerly Project Falcon). This product is easy to use, and supports real time processing of drag coefficients, and other variables. Flow Design is, however, an expensive subscription based service.

The only free alternative that I could find was OpenFOAM. Based on my research so far, this is a very powerful CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) package, which can take .STL models and produce a wind tunnel-based analysis on them.

It does however require a lot more work to set up, particularly in windows, since the program is designed for linux (There are however windows binaries).

Like many linux programs, OpenFoam is command line based, although there are GUI’s available.

I intend to attempt to install and configure OpenFoam for use as a wind tunnel with custom shapes. I will post my progress as I do so.