I am a professor of building science in an architectural science program. My specialty is building envelope performance, and lately, many students (and practitioners) are interested in modelling natural ventilation strategies for buildings. If anyone out there could suggest a fruitful path of investigation, it would be greatly appreciated. My objective is to access quick and dirty techniques which provide graphic representations of air flow and temperature distributions within a building space using PC technology which is affordable to educational institutions. Ideally, 3D AutoCad models could be adapted to perform the simulations.

(1). The fact is the capability of CFD to do such thing is not quite there yet. (2). People are still doing research to improve the convergence of the solution algorithms, not to mention the modeling of the turbulence. (3). If the solution from your PC in the classroom changes from class to class, it is not going to be very useful to the students. I mean, whether the solution will remain the same on the PC, is still a big problem today. (4). There are several so-called general purpose CFD programs on the market, and I think, they all can simulate the 3-D flow in a building. If you are lucky, it may take you a few days to get an answer. So, don't try the real time solution in the classroom. (5). By the way, for teaching purposes, it is probably all right to use a model building,so that the demand on the computer resources can be minimized. I would encourage you to give it a try first.

Ted,

If I understand you correctly, I think you would be very interested in the Bild-IT project - for more info please see http://zippy.waterloo.aeat.com/Bild-IT/

FLOVENT by Flomerics was created for your application. FLOVENT is not a general-purpose CFD code so it is comparatively easy-to-use and fast. FLOVENT has been around for about 10 years and has been validated against experimental data from numerous building-type configurations. FLOVENT has all the features you mention, including the ability to interface with 3D AutoCad.

I would be happy to provide more details and discuss academic licenses with you.