Has anyone used Phoenics' special purpose FLAIR program for building ventilation design? I work at a ventilation consulting firm, and we wanted to trial the program. We haven't used a CFD approach yet, so I'm somewhat concerned about the learning curve (with our degreed engineers). I am specifically interested in ease of use and support.

Thanks

I currently use FLAIR and I am a degreed engineer.

The learning curve is not to steep. I have not used the support but the program is relatively easy to use.

Be prepared, it does take a while to input complex geometry and set up the models and it can take a long time to run various models. By way of comparison, i have just run a model over 10min real time that took over 90 hours on the computer to run on a P3 desktop machine.

Should you require additional information feel free to email me directly.

Dear Tammy

"Learning curve" for FLAIR (ie. PHOENICS) or for CFD?

If you work at a ventilation consulting firm I suppose you have experience on CFD projects, so I will assume you are talking about PHOENICS' learning curve.

PHOENICS is one of the oldest and mature software of the CFD market. It have been tested in thousands of industrial cases and scientific problems and their capabilities are already well stablished. So, I think you had did a good selection.

Now, I recommend you to follow in the same direction and to contract somebody (maybe temporarily) who introduce you into those capabilities, while he(or she) solves this problem for you. You will save time and money.

Talk with CHAM personnel (www.cham.co.uk), or any other research institute specialized in CFD projects using PHOENICS (as mine: www.litec.csic.es).

Regards

Kike