I have noticed some issues with Flow Design. I feel like this is a beta, and that it needs considerable amounts of work in order for this software to be of use. I will list some of the bigger issues I have had so far. Ultimately it comes down to "What is the purpose?" and "who is this geared towards?".
1. The most annoying feature is the scroll to zoom in and the nav wheel. It is oposite from AutoCAD. Since it looks the same it should behave the same. I sroll to zoon in, but I zoom out because it is reversed.
2. No option to save a simulation. Each time I open the same stl file, I need to rotate the model, adjust windspeed, tunnel size, etc. It becomes very tedious when doing this for many components. (even if I do some of the work for personal reasons to keep my skills sharp)
3. The planar air flow should still move in 3D. Just because it starts in a plane doesnt mean the cross section it hits is straight. This leads to false aerodynamics (this the edge of a round surface. The wind will NOT go above and below and rather to the side)
4. Air pockets are too large. Another user in another post mentioned air flow will not go through open windows or the like. Some times air pockets will form, but others air will go through. FD seems to have a problem with this (As well as air somehow sneaking INSIDE a sealed shape).
5. No readings for specific points on a surface. If I see a large bright red spot on a fuselage, that is an area that needs to be addressed, but without the actual pressure I dont know how much more it needs to be reinforced. Eyeball express works for hobby and educational use, but not for actual engineering.
6. The time stamp on the drag graph is pointless. As the engineer I am less concerned about the software's time to render or calculate etc, I am concerned with the time the model spends in the wind tunnel. Also regarding time, some objects will never be stabilized, so with a real time aspect one can pick a point sufficiently far after acceleration to determine a psuedo stabil model.
7. InH2O Really? I have only come across inches in water in physics experiments. In/Hg is what we use. Even PSI would have been good. I would have liked to us pascals but not with metric units for length. Such as drag which internationall is measured in lbs (like pounds of thrust for aircraft engine ratings). The same with air speed. m/s is virtually useless in automotive applications. km/h or mph would be needed. For aviation knots is used.This brings me to the next point.
8. It lacks the ability to change measurements accordingly. I can only choose to presents. One would need to set each value in the system that is called for. I may need lbs for drag and km/h for air speed. Or any other combination.
9.Scaling is limited and no information about model dimensions is given. So if you design something in inches, you have to go back to the dwg and rescale things. Placement of the model in the tunnel is purely eyeball, the windtunnel size again is purely eyeball. There should be a setting to manually input this info. Also, there is a difference between the actually tunnel as a structure and the flow of air. They are not the same (and do not appear the same in FD) but there is no way to set it, again purely eyeballing it until the model is "engulfed" by the flow.
10. Limited airspeed. The max airspeed is somewhere aroudn half of mach1. Granted that supersonic testing is a whole other ball game, but since the demo model has a 707, it should at least be able to show its cruising speed. (Back to point 3, wingtip vortices are non existent, therefore making me doubt of how accurate this is)
11. The lighting function is useless. Not to mention that surfaces turn darker when zooming in. Making certain areas invisible. This isnt a render, its a coloring for surface pressures exerted. Using the light is simply a photoshop style increase in contrast. The model should not cast shadows or be shaded in any way, especially when the only means of measuring surface pressure in a specific point is color, which ends up being altered by the shading.
12. The smoke option is the same as lines. Instead of it being a point through which smoke is inserted to test a specific area and see the air flow. Making the air flow smaller is not the same thing. An engineer needs to see how air at one point reacts with ambient air. This may be limited by the file types supported, since after conversion the models became very angular and lose any level of precision.
So the question is, who is this meant for? It seems more like a game or diversion that a useful engineering tool. There is no useful data, and if there is a way to save the drag graph, I haven't found it. (Although as I mention above, I have doubts regarding accuracy.) So I played around, testing a few things and that may be it. Hopefully a new version will come out and take into account these problems.
Also, the 707 has its landing gear doors down. Half of them should be back up (I wont go into which ones exactly, but those of you that have worked on a 707 based A/C will see it. The model is more like the plane is on the ground being worked on) and the nose landing gear wheels are a LOT smaller than the MLG. That's just a very minor thing that bugs me, but...Autodesk should pick more precise models for new software, right?
Alex
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