FIA
The FIA or Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile are an association established in 1904 to represent the interests of motoring organisations and motor car users.
In an effort to improve overtaking, in particular reduce loss in aerodynamic performance of following cars, F1 and the FIA set about completely rewriting the aerodynamic technical regulations.
The challenge
The new regulations needed to:
1- Produce cars that lose significantly less downforce when following a lead car.
2- Allow teams to develop cars that would have high levels of performance.
3- Have sufficient freedom to ensure that it wouldn’t become a ‘one make’ series.
A small team of experienced aerodynamicists was brought together and given the task of developing these rules. They chose bramble as the CFD platform to support aerodynamic development.
This was due to bramble’s experience with CFD & motorsport aerodynamics. Plus how the platform is tailored to motorsport CFD and is user-friendly; enabling non-CFD engineers to run high end simulations. bramble also customised the platform to meet the project’s specific needs.
F1 teams have large aerodynamics departments but the regulations team was small. Although not in direct competition with the teams, they needed to produce an initial car that had ‘F1 levels’ of performance.
Their one big advantage was that they didn’t have any compute restrictions like the F1 teams and so they had the ability to run large numbers of simulations.
In order to do this, large parts of the CFD process had to be automated, letting the users “Focus on Engineering”
In bramble measuring the drag and down-force of vehicle following vehicle, with pre-processing only taking seconds rather than a day.
The bramble solution
The FIA ran the following types of simulation:
General aerodynamic development
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Half car simulations (straight line and steady state RANS only).
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Full car simulations (straight and yaw, both steady state RANS and transient DES).
Car-following-car studies
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Two car simulations with the following car offset over a range of distances.
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“Gold Standard” simulation was a full transient DES simulation large models, long running, using lots of compute.
Value realised
In one year of the project, the 3 aerodynamicists produced 3000 simulations – more than 10 per working day.
These were all full detail models (not isolated components or other small test models).
This used large amounts of compute which was only practical thanks to the power of AWS (Amazon Web Services). Thousands of cores running around the world, orchestrated by bramble.
