Its my birthday fairly soon and I'm concerned about the airflow required that will be required to blow out the candles on my cake - as there will be quite a few candles. Having used CFD to succesfully model the watering can spouts we design I'm now looking to perform some preliminary CFD simulations to determine if I have enough wind to blow out ALL of the candles. Does anyone have any experience in this kind of complex physical modelling involving combustion?

PS any tips on how I model the candles in build as they are the fancy spiral grooved ones?

I would suspect that there are probably too many candles for even CFX to model .....

How many candles are required to be modelled - sounds like its around 40? I would imagine you would have enough wind for that

given its firey name do you think Phoenics would be a more suitable application then if CFX isn't up to the job?

Maybe there is room for a vertical application here - "CFX-Candle"?

I heard that there was a new "hot air" CFD code on the market, think its called Glondefiled3D - might like to look into it?

I'd imagine that CFX-Candle would require doing a large amount of meshing to begin with - too time consuming for serious CFD folk, looking to get results on a real "problem".

heard its pretty good myself

Ah yes, but I've heard the support level is rather crap on it. Not overly "responsive".

whats support?

I think that a real time experiment would work out much cheaper that the simulation on CFX or FLUENT.

Bob, happy birthday (never mind the CFD )! matej