free technology preview of Project Calrissian for CFD extended to November 25, 2016

Who wouldn't like more time?

Project Falcon was our previous technology preview that simulated air flow around vehicles, buildings, outdoor equipment, consumer products, or other objects of your choosing in a virtual wind tunnel. Falcon technology was extremely geometry tolerant and easy to use, enabling you to begin seeing and understanding air flow behavior within seconds of starting the application. Results updated almost in real-time in response to changes in wind-direction and speed that you specified. Visualization tools included 2D and 3D flow lines, shaded result planes, vector plots, and surface pressure shading. Quantified outputs included velocity, pressure, drag force, and drag coefficient. Project Falcon used a revolutionary automatic meshing technology that handled flow around any geometry at any stage of design. This technology was coupled with a transient, incompressible fluid flow solver and LES turbulence model in a way that delivered quick results and required very little setup on behalf of the user. The technology preview graduated to become Autodesk Flow Design.

There was also a previous technology preview called Project Ventus for Simulation CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) that used numerical analysis and algorithms to solve and analyze problems that involve fluid flows. The technology preview was a solution for generating CFD quality meshes for models that would traditionally be impossible to mesh without tedious CAD cleanup and alteration. The goal of Project Ventus was to eliminate time and effort required to generate quality CFD meshes for external flow analyses in Autodesk Simulation CFD software. Project Ventus also provided a secondary benefit: There were file types that Project Ventus could read and generate meshes for that Simulation CFD could not work with at the time, including Autodesk Alias, Google Sketchup, STL, and OBJ files. This technology preview has since retired.

Today, we have Project Calrissian for CFD which is our free technology preview of an application that combines functionality from Autodesk Flow Design and Project Ventus. The bulk of this preview includes enhancements to the capabilities of Flow Design. These enhancements include solver optimizations, the ability to pause an analysis, lift and drag charts, and additional results viewing capabilities. When the need arises to go beyond the fluids physics of Project Calrissian, there is the ability to export the model directly to Autodesk CFD. Surface wrapping technology that existed in Project Ventus now resides in Project Calrissian and allows you to push the surface wrapped geometry directly into Autodesk CFD 2017 for more detailed analysis.

Join the project.

Last week I posted a build to the project that extends the technology preview to November 25, 2016, so there is plenty of time for you to try it for yourself and report back your results. As we did on Project Falcon and Project Ventus, we look forward to your feedback on Project Calrissian. You can reach the team via [email protected] or the feedback forum associated with the Autodesk Labs project on the Autodesk Feedback Community site. Based on feedback, the technology could then graduate, retire, or be extended. Its fate is in your hands. Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you are my only hope.

The force is still alive in the lab.