I've been doodling around with powder toy for a few weeks now and am curious about how realistic the air simulation is.

The reason I ask is because I work in the water restoration industry. When drying out a house we set fans in an effort to create a vortex around the affected area. Is Powder Toy accurate enough to help me determine the optimum placement of fans in an arbitrary shaped room with the objective of getting good airflow throughout the room? If so, I intend to hack it into something a little more useable for my purposes and have some questions about the source.

well i have been playing around with it, and it works largely as expected. i was just wondering about some pockets of dead air i've been able to create and if that is a realistic representation. i realize that there are going to be many approximations due to it only using 2 dimensions instead of 3. my main goal is to just get a rough approximation of the air flow to see where pockets of dead air might be. since for the most part i deal with floor level, im not concerened with the 3rd dimension too much

i meant to say, not just finding dead air, but also the most efficient way to remove the dead air. for eample, in tpt if i make a L-shaped room and have dead air in one of the legs, i can put fans going counter clockwise or clockwise. in tpt, one direction is significantly better (whichever is opposite of the other leg). my goal is to find how accurate the dead air is and whether switching the rotation makes that much differnce in reality since that is non-obvious on site.

i find it by setting up a room and fans, then putting a gas in it, usually noble gas. if there is a place that iss dead, the noble gas goes into it and stays (or at least lingers for an extended time). when i'm back at my computer, i can make some pictures to illustrate what happens.

Edit:

I uploaded an example with two rooms....

the ID is 1570645

Now I will explain more detail about my concerns and goal is. The room with 4 air movers is kind of the standard set up for a room that is only partially wet. The room that has 10 air movers is the best way I've found to efficiently remove all the NOBL gas. My concern, after playing around with this, is that by leaving dead air, I may be pushing humid air into parts of a room or house that are not being dehumidified. Now I realize that this is not a very good simulation of this because differences in vapor pressure will cause the humidity in the air to equalize. However, if that is a reasonable approximation of how the air would flow around the room, I can take the source code and modify it to take into account vapor pressure. So, my first question is is it a reasonable approximation of air flow?