MacroAir Leverages Rescale to Elevate the Customer Experience with Simulation

San Bernadino, CA – MacroAir is the pioneer of the High Volume, Low Speed (HVLS) fan industry. Our HVLS fans move massive amounts of air, and one way we are different from our competitors is that we provide our CFD-based AirViz service to simulate and prove the effectiveness of our fans. We model the airflow in any given space when our fans are present. We chose Rescale’s platform and API to provide a cost-efficient and powerful solution, allowing us to programmatically model the simulations and automate the process. Rescale’s platform has saved our team significant time and money.
About the AirViz Service
We provide the AirViz service for our customers and distributors. This service is based upon CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) in which we’ve created an easy to use interface where customers can use the power of CFD to validate the performance of their solution before purchase and installation. It’s a huge selling tool for MacroAir and one that we’ve optimized through Rescale’s platform.

Challenges
The difficulty with providing this service using traditional methods is that it takes time and money to model buildings, model obstructions (racking, equipment, etc.), place fans, and run simulations. We began exploring the possibility of developing a web application that would somehow submit data to a local server or a cloud server, model the data, and return the results to the web application for easy access. It was quite difficult to find a service that would do exactly what we needed.
Implementing Rescale
We selected Rescale because its platform is an easy-to-use, out of the box solution. With our new web application we can use the Rescale API to submit, run, and retrieve the results of AirViz jobs that our distributors create. The results show the estimated airflow in the modeled spaces based upon the fans selected and their placement in the modeled spaces. There was nothing else that we found that would have been so easy to implement.


Looking at the above legend on the left-hand side of the results, we can see how well our fans are covering a particular space in terms of airflow velocity. Purple is faster moving air and light green is slower moving air. The top-down view shows the airflow at 3 feet above the ground, which is the space that humans typically occupy and thus the most important space for determining if those fans are positively impacting the given space. Using the Rescale platform allows us to see how well our products perform in various circumstances.
The Value
The real benefit that Rescale provided was to be able to use the API to integrate our web application. Users draw out the dimensions of their space and place fans with OpenFOAM and ParaView, where the fan’s airflow is simulated in the space with the provided dimensions. Rescale has allowed us to automate our airflow simulations, which brings us from manually building out simulations on a local computer to putting the tools in the hands of our distributors to be able to easily do it on their own. This acceleration and increased efficiency get these results to potential customers faster to see how well the fans will work in their space. This leads to sales conversions and more revenue for the company.
Working with Rescale’s platform has saved our team time and money. The less that we build out the programming in our web application and on the backend in OpenFOAM and ParaView, the more of our engineering team’s time and money we save and can allocate to more important projects.
Chris Dierker, Graphic Designer & Web Developer, added: “Rescale is the perfect solution for cloud computing. Beyond being able to run simulations in the cloud, it has an API that allows for seamless integration with web and other applications. Our web application development was dependent upon Rescale’s platform and it delivered exactly what we needed.”
About MacroAir:
Headquartered in San Bernardino, CA, MacroAir is the pioneer of the HVLS (High-Volume, Low-Speed) fan industry. We are dedicated to continually innovating and perfecting the world’s most efficient fans for businesses. MacroAir products are made in the USA, but can be found around the world creating comfortable climates in a more cost-effective and energy-efficient way than traditional fans and HVAC systems. www.macroairfans.com
About Rescale:
Rescale is the world’s leading cloud platform provider of simulation software and high performance computing (HPC) solutions. Rescale’s platform solutions are deployed securely and seamlessly to enterprises via a web-based application environment powered by preeminent simulation software providers and backed by the largest commercially available HPC infrastructure. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Rescale’s customers include global Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace, automotive, life sciences, marine, consumer products, and energy sectors. For more information on Rescale products and services, visit www.rescale.com.