Smoke sucked into Turbine

[Donald2B]

I am VERY new to Phoenix and to any type of smoke/fire simulations, so I am struggling with how to approach this problem.

I need to show air being sucked into the Inlet end of a Turbine. They like the idea of the air being represented by colored smoke.

What I did was to have smoke falling in front of the inlet and then used another source for "air" to blow the smoke into the turbine.

It looks okay, but is there a better way to go about this?
Or should I use particle flow to create the movement and then put that into Phoenix?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[LarsSonparsson]

I would try to use some force, like negative ranged wind, to actually suck the smoke in to turbine. Dont know if that would work, but it could give natural looking flow.

[Ivaylo Katev]

there are many options for this simulation. the simplest one is to put a wind force and to set decay of the force. this will simulate slower, due to some technical problems of the standard max forces.
another way to do this is to use the mapper object to affect the velocity. put colored velocity representation in the first map, and distance texture in the mask map, that will determine the active zone
third option is to use PF, create short living particles and set them as brush mode source. deselect all the channels of the source except the velocity.

[Donald2B]

Thanks for the tips...I'm going to be giving them a try today.

Cheers!