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.

Can we Make Science Cheaper by Crowd-Sourcing Experiments?

I admit that crowd sourcing science experiments sounds a little risky.  Since it's difficult to be fired from a job you do for free, contributors to crowd-sourced science experiments would have less incentive to do precise work or to keep their paradigms and biases from influencing the results they observe and report. Crowd sourcing science could certainly introduce unexpected and undocumented variables. On the other hand, large data sets are valuable.  And there may be a side benefit to gathering large data sets from an un-characterized group of real people living real lives in real homes - the data may lead to conclusions that are more directly applicable to the populations we are trying to learn about.

We can test the viability of crowd-sourced data collection by comparing conclusions drawn by crowd-sourced experimentation to the conclusions drawn from traditionally collected data. One example of crowd-sourced data collection is fuelly.com, where people report actual gas mileage for their vehicles. I did a quick spot check for the V6 Toyota Camry sedan. It would be an interesting exercise to repeat this check for a large group of vehicles.

On fuelly.com, the 119 participating drivers of V6 Toyota Camry sedans submitted fuel economy data for thousands of fill-ups. For this vehicle make and model, the most frequently reported gas mileage is 24 mpg, with a roughly bell curve shaped distribution of reported mileage ranging from a low of 16 mpg to a high of 32 mpg. According to fueleconomy.gov, fuel economy is measured for pre-production prototypes of new cars by the manufacturer using standardized test procedures specified by federal law. The EPA reviews the test results and spot checks 10 - 15% of them. This methodology predicted that the 2011 V6 Toyota Camry sedan would yield 20 mpg city, 29 mpg freeway, and 23 mpg combined.

In this case, the results are pretty close, but Camry drivers on fuelly.com got slightly better mileage than expected based on EPA regulated test data.  I saw lots of tips on fuelly.com for getting better gas mileage...I suppose it's possible that users of fuelly.com more frequently exhibit a bias toward maximizing fuel economy than the EPA testing procedures account for.