Is there an easy way to measure projected area for CFD?

[fischele]

I am doing CFD analysis for the "F1 in schools" Project, my CFD Software is Autodesk CFD 2019, my CAD software is Autodesk Fusion 360. From my Reseearch on the Autodesk forum, neither of those include a way to measure projected surface area, so I used the workaround of sketching the outline in orthogonal view, creating a thin body via extruding and measuring its surface. However, this is very inaccurate and takes far too much time.
I would greatly appreciate anyone who has a soloution either in Fusion/CFD or via an external program.

[jjn9128]

To what end are you calculating the area? Is it for a Cx calculation? If that's the case I would say absolute accuracy is not so important - in fact you might even say to be discouraged. If yes I'll explain otherwise I'll keep my trap shut because I'm not familiar with those softwares.

[LVDH]

Are you sure you need it? You can just use Aref=1m². Then your Cx results will already be Cx*A, which is what you actually need to calculate the forces.
Another option is creating an image of the front view, but keep everything black with a white background and then with some Python or other simple language you can count the pixels and with that determine the area.
Or if you have stl files of your car with Paraview you can do it as well:
http://www.discretizer.org/node/20
This method however does not work very well with large and complex stl files but a F1 in school car should be fine.

[Greg Locock]

One thing would be to extrude your vehicle surface by several metres in x, thne cut a section on the yz plane.