Project Falcon: Free Interactive Wind Tunnel Simulation Software

Project Falcon is wind tunnel simulation software brought to us as a free technology preview by Autodesk Labs. The goal of Project Falcon is to help designers intelligently consider the aerodynamic properties of their designs without first having to learn computational fluid dynamics (CFD). This could be a great thing for vehicle designers.

Windows is the only supported operating system, but the minimum hardware requirements look pretty achievable.

To me, the exciting features of Project Falcon are:

• Free to download; no Autodesk license required
• Broadly accessible user-interface (Probably less intimidating than Elmer for your first foray into Aerodynamic design)
• Easy installation (register with Autodesk, download the project falcon installer, run the installer, double click the icon, then open the STL file you want to check the aerodynamics for)
• Blog/forum support via Autodesk Labs
• Users develop an intuitive grasp of aerodynamic principals using Project Falcon's rapid visual feedback in response to design and parameter changes
• No specialized knowledge required to study the aerodynamic properties of your 3D designs

If anything could motivate me to mess around with Microsoft Windows, it's probably Project Falcon, owing to the 2nd and last bullets on the list.

Here is a brief video introduction to Project Falcon via Autodesk Labs.



One thing the Project Falcon overview page emphasizes is the high speed with which this software calculates and displays results. A prominent complaint in the wind power optimization research papers I've run across is that CFD is computationally expensive and time consuming. So is Project Falcon sacrificing quality for speed? Probably. But this Project Falcon Validation paper shows that Project Falcon at least calculated the the correct coefficients of drag for a sphere, a cube, a cone, and an odd polyhedron that looks like a brick with 3 corners cut off and something small sticking out the bottom. I can't help wondering if Project Falcon has potential as a tool for optimizing the shapes of home-use wind turbine airfoils.

In the Aero Challenge, Local Motors has invited members of its open source vehicle design community to to use Project Falcon to help create a more aerodynamic design for the next Peterbuilt big rig.

Interactive Intro to Aerodynamics/CFD by Local Motors

If you are interested in automotive design and looking to develop a better intuitive grasp of aerodynamics, today is your lucky day.

PeterBuilt is sponsoring a design competition for the next Big Rig via the Local Motors Forge, a place where interested members of the online open source community can go to work and play at vehicle design.

The Local Motors website is encouraging visitors to download Project Falcon, and use it to play around with edgy new Big Rig designs for the Peterbuilt design competition.  Project Falcon is a new and at least temporarily free piece of wind tunnel simulation software that allows for interactive investigation of the aerodynamic performance of designs, and is intended to be used early in the conceptual design phase. Project Falcon reads .STL files, so you have a lot of options for CAD software to model your ideas. The goal is to find a design that will look good and increase fuel economy by achieving greater aerodynamic optimization of the vehicle. The motivation?  10 Awards, and $15,000 in prizes.

The design submission period is June 5th - June 26th.

Here's the video via Local Motors:




Project Falcon may also be a great tool for those of you looking to get into Open Source Aircraft design.

Look out for a future post with more details on Project Falcon software.

Plans for a Simple DIY Wind Generator

The Chispito Wind Generator is a small, DIY wind power generator capable of generating 100 Watts in a 30 mph wind. It starts charging a 12-Volt battery in a 7-10 mph wind, and you can build one with the relatively short list of inexpensive parts and tools found here. The Chispito Wind Generator uses an old treadmill motor for the generator.

If your electricity use is average (around 11,500 kWh/year for US households) and you lived somewhere with 30 mph winds 24-7, this thing could provide about 7.5% of your power needs.  Nobody I know lives anywhere that is consistently that windy, but the Chispito Wind Generator could be a fun and educational DIY project in a lot of places. Here is an 80-meter wind resource map of the US that may give you some idea of the wind speeds in your area, although 80 meters is a bit high for a back yard wind generator.

For pictures and build instructions, check out "How to Build a Chispito Wind Generator" page.

You make the blades on this baby using some cut up PVC pipe and sand paper. I love that the tools and materials needed to build these blades are so close to universally accessible. If you follow this blog, bets are probably good that you could finish a significant percentage of this wind power generator project before making a trip to the hardware store.

All that said, the  DIY aviation nut in me is screaming that we need an inexpensive, open-source way to optimize airfoils for domestic-use, DIY wind power generators. Look out for a future post on the huge increases in power generation that can be obtained by using well-optimized airfoils, and my ideas about how we can make such airfoils inexpensive and widely available.

Craftsmanspace.com is Loaded with Free Design Resources

Craftsmanspace.com is full of free projects and technical plans, free books, free software, free 3D models, free patterns in various file formats, and free lessons on how to use carpentry tools.

The sheer diversity of resources available there is somewhat staggering.

Here are some highlights from my exploration of craftsmanspace:

• More free books about aviation than I could read in 10 years, including this one about helicopter design.
• A book from NASA entitled Capturing Energy From the Wind on the craftsmanspace renewable energy books page
• Playground equipment plans
• A huge list of free 3D CAD software
• A free 3D model/2D profile of a cat shaped wall coat rack (scroll down after the jump) in STEP/DXF format
• A scroll saw pattern for a portrait of Nikola Tesla in .SVG, .EPS, .DWG, .JPG, .GIF and .PNG
• Lessons on using a sliding T-Bevel

Elmer: Open Source Finite Element Software

If you're into science or design engineering, you should probably check out Elmer. Among a host of other great applications, this free, Finland-born software can help you design airplanes, predict the temperature distribution of a heat exchanger, and do your quantum mechanics homework.

At its core, Elmer is an open source finite element solver of partial differential equations. Development of Elmer began in 1995 as a collaboration between Finnish universities, research institutes and private industry, and was primarily developed by Finland's CSC IT Center for Science. Elmer was released as open source in 2005. According to the Elmer FAQ page, Elmer has hundreds of regular users worldwide and thousands of Elmer test users annually.

Click here for a 3-minute video introduction to Elmer.

Elmer processes partial differential equations in a descrete form, and handles coupled systems, non-linearities, and time-dependencies. The Elmer GUI allows the user to either import meshes or create simple ones in a variety of file types, and generates output in .grd, .mesh, and .ep files. The source code of Elmer is written in Fortran 90, C, and C++, and is distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL). The Elmer source code is here on sourceforge.

Here is a 10-minute Elmer tutorial from Elmer's YouTube Channel.


Thank you, Finland. It appears that your song needs a new verse.

Open Source Aircraft Design Software from NASA

I hereby retract any complaints I may have recently made about paying taxes.

The heroes at NASA just gave us some open source aircraft design software called Open VSP (vehicle sketch pad). This open source software is designed to let the  user rapidly create high-fidelity parametric design/structural layout for conceptual aircraft designs, resulting in models that can be processed into formats suitable for engineering analysis. According to the wiki, it's been under development since the early 90's, and J. R. Gloudemans, P.C. Davis, and P.A. Gelhausen presented a publication on the development of VSP at the 34th Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit in January 1996.

I'm guessing VSP has come a long way since then.

This ten-minute video introduces some of the features of Open VSP, by building and analysing an SR-71 Blackbird-like model:



The above video was created by Bill Fredericks, and stolen from the Open VSP Video Tutorial Page, which also contains a handful of more in-depth video tutorial videos created by Ami Patel.

The Open VSP code repository is on GitHub. The Open VSP wiki is here, and the Open VSP google group is here.

If you want to get going with some open source aircraft design, click here to visit the Open VSP project website and download the software.

You can find lots of free resources for open source aircraft design on my aircraft design page.

Green Power Science LLC offers Free DIY Solar Power instructions on Youtube

The folks at GreenPowerScience have provided a free collection of great DIY solar power tutorials.

You may need engineering chops to want to do this sort of thing, but the GreenPowerScience team seems to break things down in a way that makes an engineering or technology background optional. Here's the example that got me inspired to create my own residential solar power system:




I am not sold on the idea that solar power can be cost-effective. In the 2nd quarter of 2011, the average cost of residential solar power systems was $6.42 per Watt. I've heard of DIY solar power gurus claiming to achieve $1 per Watt...but I have also read that solar cells alone cost $2.50/Watt, and that the cost of other components adds up fast. When/if I build my own system inspired by the GreenPowerScience team, I hope to document my costs and time investment for a future post. My swag on financial break-even is as follows:

Divide the initial cost per Watt at installation by 1W x hours/day of sun x (1kW/1000W) x days of sunshine/year x 0.7 to account for reduced generation when sunshine is less direct x $/kWh.  According to my math, the $6.42 per Watt system would take 46 years to pay for itself at 15 cents/kWh. Using the map of average daily solar radiation from nationalatlas.gov could help tighten these numbers a bit.

Here's an informative post from Michael Bluejay on the cost of electricity, and here is another where he makes the case that (subsidized) solar is affordable. Data from the US Energy Information Administration, show that the average cost per kilowatt hour in the USA is 11.5 cents, with a low of 7.99 cents in Idaho and a high of 28.10 cents in Hawaii.

It could be an educational, exciting, and productive form of charity/volunteer work to build and install residential photovoltaic power systems for families who are having difficulty making ends meet, instead of making one-time monetary donations. That sort of project could fit well with Christmas in April initiatives like this one, or Habitat for Humanity.

Free Open Source Wind Farm Design Software

According to their website, an Albany NY based company called AWS True Power has released open source wind farm design software that is free to download and use.  The free software is called AWS Openwind, and anyone is free to join the community of users and make improvements to the software.  You can download the software, watch instructional videos and view tutorials on the AWS Openwind website.  You can also see screen shots of the software here.

If you need advanced features like deep array wake models, grid layout, or optimization for cost of energy, AWS has an enterprise version of the software available for sale...but I'm thinking that for my first backyard windmill, the free version will do the trick.

If you have used the openwind software and have any comments about it, I'd love to hear them.

I want to develop a free tool with a friendly user interface that will allow casual users to optimize windmill airfoils, siting, and generator parts for construction and use at their homes.  I have used CNC rapid prototyping technology for custom airfoils.  If you are interested in any aspect of optimizing home wind power generation I would love to hear from you.

The Open Source Tech Revolution wind power resource page is here.

Free College, Anyone?

Coolest.  Website.  Ever.

Thanks to one of my brilliant physics major friends from Mercer University, I just learned about a coursera.org, a website where anyone can take college courses for free.  The course offering is not huge yet, but they are working on it.  And they already have a few that could keep me busy for awhile (hello, Statistics 1 and Machine Learning!).  The courses they offer are split into the following categories:

•  humanities and social sciences
• mathematics and statistics
• society, networks and information
• healthcare, medicine and biology
• economics, finance and business
• computer science

I have heard it said that the invention of the printing press sparked the industrial revolution by allowing information to flow more freely.  If that is true, then we can expect huge things to come from this new era of free, nearly instant access to information.  Here's lookin' at you, Wikipedia!