AiRO - A Wind Tunnel in Your Pocket

Triathlon Forum
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Hi everyone,

A few months ago I shared a post on the optimal bottle positions for triathlon and y’all seemed quite interested. I had built a tool that allowed me to run mid-fidelity CFD in the cloud, fast and affordably, focusing on body position and helmet choice.

We have now made this tool available as AiRO. You can create your own personal Digital Aero Twin from a photo and a few measurements , adjust the posture with sliders and image overlays of your actual position, and then we run CFD on it and give you results.

One simulation is $8-10, and we can return results in seven minutes, allowing for interactive exploration of your position.

We’d love it if you would check it out and give us feedback.

airo.app

I have been doing aero testing and CFD for a while and share my background in this post

Happy to answer questions you might have and I look forward to learning from all of you on where we should go next. There is a lot more to come!
Best,

Ingmar

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Is the app available for Iphone?

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Yes, it is a web app, so it runs in your browser, but can also be installed.

Just click this link:

Simulate.airo.app

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Seems super cool and I’m interested in trying it.

Does it provide any guidance on how to make improvements? Maybe I decide to pay $10 to analyze my current position. Ok, what do I do now to get more aero? I don’t want to spend another $10 per attempt trying out random stuff.

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The demo dummy created from my pic seems to have longer legs than me. Does it not consider torso to legs proportions provided in the picture or is this just a limitation of the demo?

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Thanks for the feedback. It generally does, and that that’s not an issue we have seen so far.

If you go into the “my aero twins” menu and select the one you created, it will give you all the measurements. Then you can press the fine tune button, and adjust any measurements you want to fine tune, it will update the model. Leg length is one of them

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Great point. Right now it is a “virtual wind tunnel” that provides the measurements of what you want to try.
Mid term we hope to build recommender functionally into the app. We are also about to launch a social media series where we show the most useful things you can do to improve your drag.

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Hi @trying2hard. I realized I probably misunderstood your question.
The demo mode that is available without logging in has a few generic Digital Aero Twins already created for you to try. They are not specific to you.
To create your own personalized Digital Aero Twin, you need to have an account and be logged in.

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I created an account and started exploring…just with basic inputs and a photo.

So far it looked really well done and the UI is really cool in my view. A few comments/questions

  • i found it seemed to be generally better on a PC than a phone
  • When you upload a ride position image its possible to scale up and down the model but i wasnt sure to to move it left or right or up and down so that you can match/overlay exactly (i could do ot on ohone not sure how to do it on pc) - is there a trick i am missing
  • Once you have uploaded a rider image, does it autodetect all the angles and then you change it for tweaks in position you want to test or do you need to adjust all the angles to “match” the overlay as part of the process
    –The one simulation i ran produced the same cda for no bike and cda total with bike - is there a setting somewhere i missed? Overall the cda seemed too low (not sure if this is just the bike not added issue however)
  • Apart from the aero aspect i think this could be a really cool tool for fitters to help them visualise positions for their clients
  • Obviously the service is based on the cloud computing cost to run. At the moment it may still work out a bit expensive in a personal capacity as a few tests will add up very very quickly but once the computing cost comes down i can imagine this being an amazing tool
  • I think if you used this in combination with aero sensor ot would be very very powerful. CFD to narrow what you want to test and then real world validation
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Hi ryinc,
Thanks for the feedback, and for trying it out. Do you have any screenshots you can share?
Here are some clarifications:

i found it seemed to be generally better on a PC than a phone

Agreed. The phone is great if you want to do this on the go, the big screen of a tablet or PC is certainly nicer for real applications.

When you upload a ride position image its possible to scale up and down the model but i wasnt sure to to move it left or right or up and down so that you can match/overlay exactly (i could do ot on ohone not sure how to do it on pc) - is there a trick i am missing

On mac, use two finger mouse press to move the object. On PC I believe its the right mouse click.

Once you have uploaded a rider image, does it autodetect all the angles and then you change it for tweaks in position you want to test or do you need to adjust all the angles to “match” the overlay as part of the process

Right now, you can use the sliders to match your baseline position. It typically takes me around two minutes. After that is done you can create variations in seconds. Auto fit to the image is in the works, but will take a while to reach production quality.

The one simulation i ran produced the same cda for no bike and cda total with bike - is there a setting somewhere i missed? Overall the cda seemed too low (not sure if this is just the bike not added issue however)

You can set the bike offset in your profile settings (click your name in the bottom of the menu). Without it, the reported numbers are for rider only.

Obviously the service is based on the cloud computing cost to run. At the moment it may still work out a bit expensive in a personal capacity as a few tests will add up very very quickly but once the computing cost comes down i can imagine this being an amazing tool
I think if you used this in combination with aero sensor ot would be very very powerful. CFD to narrow what you want to test and then real world validation

I completely agree. If you factor in the time or effort to do an aero test with a sensor, from buying the hardware, to driving to the venue, cost of your time etc., we believe $10 is an order of magnitude cheaper than another way to aero test. Since we dont model skinsuit specifics, I believe that its best to validate final results in the tunnel or with an aero sensor. For those where this is out of reach, the results of AiRO alone are far better than any alternative. Which right now is mostly copying famous riders, or asking friends.

Again, thank you for testing and Id love to see what you do with it or help where I can.

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