Overview
The free* technology preview, Project Falcon, is wind tunnel simulation software designed to be used early in the conceptual design phase. It has seamless integration with Autodesk® Alias software. It allows for interactive investigation of the aerodynamic performance of designs at any stage. Industrial designers can get intuitive simulation results for their designs in seconds with no specialist knowledge required. Simply launch Project Falcon and results appear immediately.
In addition, the latest release of Project Falcon installs as a standalone version. This allows anyone to bring geometry in from anywhere. A robust STL reader was added that opens the doors to conceptual wind tunnel simulation to everyone. Practically all modeling software export STL that can simply be imported into Falcon.
Project Falcon makes use of a revolutionary new automatic meshing technology that can handle any geometry at any stage of design. Flow and wind pressure results update almost in real-time in response to changes in wind-direction and speed. These results can be used to improve design decision making much earlier in the process.
Understanding the aerodynamic behaviour of your design is critical whenever air flows over, around, or through a design. As “organic” surfacing becomes more prevalent in industrial design, so too does the opportunity to create designs that work in harmony with the wind to reduce costly aerodynamic drag.
Documents
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You can get all the help you need for Project Falcon by downloading this zip file and extracting the conmpressed HTML file. |
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To highlight the accuracy of Project Falcon, a full 3D analysis was applied to a number of aerodynamic cases. As shown by the coefficient of drag documented in the Project Falcon Validation PDF file, in each of the cases, Project Falcon was able to settle on a value that closely matches the published values. |
Latest Update
The latest update includes AVI output as well as a standalone version in addition to the Alias plug-in.
Availability
The Alias software add-on will operate until August 31, 2012.
Get Involved
See how well Project Falcon works for you and share your feedback via the links on the upper right of this page. You can also post comments on the It's Alive in the Lab blog.
* Free technology previews are subject to the terms and conditions of the end-user license and services agreement that accompanies download of the software.
