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Free Hydro/Aero-Dynamic Software Simulators?
CottonCandyEater asks: "Every second geek dreams of owning a little plane or a yacht/sailing boat, but only few have the money to buy one. The web is full of links on how to build your plane or boat yourself. However, the right way to do it would be to simulate it with aero/hydrodynamic fluid simulation software first, in order to get performance estimates and to optimize the shape. Is there any such software available for free? maybe out of the academic world? I don't mind if it has a front-end or not, as long as it is free."
Check out http://www.icemcfd.com/cfd/CFD_codes.html - I maintain a list of CFD codes (free and otherwise) that people send me. It's not really comprehensive but should provide some starting points.
There isn't that much out there that's free, though - in the engineering community the people who need to run simulations usually have plenty of money and pay for support, and the people who don't have money (i.e. universities) either get free copies from the commercial vendors or write their own codes (still an interesting project for a student, I guess)
If anybody has entries that should be on the CFD codes list but aren't, please send them to me. Thanks!
Though it isn't quite free (About $80 USD at the moment), X-Plane does a fantastic job at modeling aerodynamics for aircraft, even letting you design your own aircraft and test them. It is primarily maintained by one person, however Piper Aircraft finds it so useful that they have models on their site that you can "fly" in X-Plane and the Carter Copter was designed and tested using X-Plane.