I was reading on MAF sensors (
Mass flow sensor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) and found this gif animation to be quite interesting.
So I tried to re-create it using using Flow Illustrator. Here's what I obtained.
From the looks of it, you can see that the "wake" pattern seems to be the same. Pretty sure that it can be even closer with some further tweaking of the velocity and viscosity.
So, it is possible to simulate with a certain precision, but as stated previously, it requires you to know what the flow should look like. Quite an interesting result nonetheless !