Dear Bigbufajw,
my name is Marco Stoller, I'm Professor Assistant at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Department of Chemical Engineering. I have expertize in process design, process control, membrane technolgies, nanotechnologies and finally CFD, all topics covered by papers on international scientific peer reviewed journals.
Concerning your need, I wonder why you ask about a CFD to solve your problem. This problem is more siutable in the topic of solid transport in liquid phase streams, a part of chemical engineering, and may be solved by far more simple approaches. A CFD in your case would only permit to obtain "photographs" of hydrodynamics which in this case are not of big interest if the question is "only" if a ball of a certain material and dimension will travel trough a pipe transported by a specific liquid at a certain velocity. Moreover CFD is very costely and may applied to a limit amount of cases; by hydrodynamic models, an Excel spreadsheet would be given and every input is calculated in seconds. A special cell will give a YES/NO answer if the ball is capaple to pass through the given pipe/input data or not.
This is why I set the bid price relatively low, compared to a CFD.
If a 3D model is somehow required, my guess is that Solidworks may be more than sufficient to simulate the specific cases for an ease of example.
If you are interested in further discussion, I'm open to answer every question you have.
Best Reagrds,
Marco Stoller