Calculating drag coefficient for complex shape

[tswanson4444]

Me and a friend at school are doing an honors project for a Computer Science class. We're trying to find the aerodynamic drag coefficient of complicated 3D Shapes entirely virtual. We started out the project with a specific physics engine in mind. It turned out this engine "Bullet Physics" doesn't calculate air resistance for meshes. We've been looking online and asking around but it seems that we only come by really complex formulas that work in specific cases only or physics emulators that wouldn't do the job.

TLDR:: Does anyone have any ideas on how to calculate the aerodynamics of complex shapes?

 

[SteamKing]

Me and a friend at school are doing an honors project for a Computer Science class. We're trying to find the aerodynamic drag coefficient of complicated 3D Shapes entirely virtual. We started out the project with a specific physics engine in mind. It turned out this engine "Bullet Physics" doesn't calculate air resistance for meshes. We've been looking online and asking around but it seems that we only come by really complex formulas that work in specific cases only or physics emulators that wouldn't do the job.

TLDR:: Does anyone have any ideas on how to calculate the aerodynamics of complex shapes?

Yeah, but most of these codes run on supercomputers. What you are talking about is called computational fluid dynamics (CFD):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_fluid_dynamics

CFD works well for certain kinds of problems, but a lot of situations involving turbulent flow are solved more easily by testing models in a wind tunnel.