Dear @chriswmackey and @mostapha,
I guess this is partly a Pollination Cloud question and partly a Ladybug Tools question:
What is your plan on the future development of Butterfly?
I have noticed that the last release on Food4Rhino was at the start of 2019. Butterfly isn’t part of the V1 LBT suite, and I’m wondering if you are planning to keep up its development and support in future?
If so, do you also plan to create Butterfly recipes in future to be run on Pollination?
Hi @max, For some reason, I missed this question.
As you mentioned, these are two different questions. The development of Butterfly has been on hold because we simply don’t have the bandwidth for developing and maintaining an additional library. We had some discussions with a few volunteers to help with the development but it never took off.
Providing recipes that can run CFD simulations using OpenFOAM is a different story. If one can use Butterfly or other software to create a valid OpenFOAM case we should be able to provide support for executing OpenFOAM on Pollination.
Can you help me to understand your use cases better? For instance, are you thinking of using Pollination for meshing? Will it be an iterative process or are you looking for a solution to submit the job and get the outputs after a certain number of iterations? Are you expecting to do the results visualization on Pollination too or are you only interested to run the simulation?
As you know we have been working on some collaboration with SimScale but the project has been slow so far. If I know more about your use case I should be able to provide a better response.
Hi @mostapha,
We rarely do CFD modelling but are increasingly seeing potential use cases for it. For the most part, I’ll see us using it either for outdoor comfort studies (i.e. adding wind factors to a spatial UTCI analysis), or to calculate pressure coefficients on a facade for natural ventilation analysis.
As a first and straightforward step, I think I’d be happy to do the meshing locally and just send the simulation to Pollination, by predefining the number of iterations and having it spit out the results when it’s done. Being able to include the meshing would be a nice bonus. I’m not too fussed about visualising the results online, partly because as mentioned above the CFD is only one step of the workflow.