MicroCFD, a better Flow Illistrator
 

Since people want to do something serious with 2d simulations I thought I would mention MicroCFD. Note it isn't exactly free.

MicroCFD - Computational Fluid Dynamics Software & Consulting

It does have a 3 day free trial however.

Note if you want to cheat this guy out of his money you can install it in a virtualbox image (It will run slower). Just installing it there won't let you cheat him and I'm not going into details on how to do it. It can be done though.

This would be fun to have but it's really too bad about the price. I know it's a drop in the bucket compared with "real" software but for a poor college student $60 is hard to justify for something that I will essentially use as a toy.

I get a bit bogged down in all the jargon on the site- is there a quick answer to what needs to be input into this program? For Flow Illustrator it's a BMP file, but what do you need for MicroCFD? Since it's a 2D program it can't be too complicated, right?

see creating a custom shape file here

MicroCFD - Virtual Wind Tunnel Tutorial

To get a list of points for a car image you can flip a BMP upside down and load it into M$ paint. M$ paint allows you see coords of where your cursor is over an image from a point in the upper left corner (this is why I told you to flip your picture upside down). From there just move your cursor over each corner and along points on each curve to get your list.

Thanks you for the link on this !
What is the easiest to learn 3D CFD program that you know of ?