CHAM can provide the equivalent of an experimental "wind tunnel",
such as is often used for measuring the drag force on an aircraft or
automobile, the spread of smoke from a chimney, or the dispersion of
a potentially-hazardous gas in a factory environment.
CHAM uses the CFD techniques embodied in its PHOENICS code to simulate
the flow phenomena. This is much faster and less costly than the
experimental alternative.
Anyone wishing to make use of the service needs only to supply
information about the geometry of the object which is to be
placed in the "Virtual Wind Tunnel", preferably in the form of .DXF or
.STL files produced by a CAD package, together with the direction and
speed of the wind.
CHAM will then import this information into PHOENICS, calculate the
flow, and supply the results in whatever form the customer requires.
The following results of flow-around-objects calculations
illustrate both the CAD-to-CFD process and the older
build-the-geometry-directly-in PHOENICS procedure.