Benetton fine tunes its cars with new fluid dynamics software
1 min read
“Ten years ago, if you had asked an F1 aerodynamicist what he would like for Christmas, the answer would have almost certainly been, ‘some kind of x-ray specs which let me see the airflow around the car.’ In essence, this is what we’ve got now from Star-CD,” says Dr Matthew Laight, Benetton’s head of CFD (computational fluid dynamics). Dean Palmer
“Ten years ago, if you had asked an F1 aerodynamicist what he would like for Christmas, the answer would have almost certainly been, ‘some kind of x-ray specs which let me see the airflow around the car.’ In essence, this is what we’ve got now from Star-CD,” says Dr Matthew Laight, Benetton’s head of CFD (computational fluid dynamics).
And it’s critical work. In F1 car design, the slightest alteration of the car’s body shape can have enormous repercussions on the car’s performance and airflow characteristics.
“The decision to use Star-CD was relatively simple,” says Laight. “[It] gives us a totally integrated solution and means we can use one suite of software to do the whole analysis.”
The Star-CD suite includes a number of application-specific pre- and post-processing systems, called ‘EZ’ tools. Benetton uses ‘EZAero’ for aerodynamic calculations and allows the geometry of the CAD model to be imported and a tailored CFD mesh to be built automatically.
And thanks to scalable parallel computing, large-scale simulations can be completed overnight. By building up fine mesh layers with Star-CD from the CAD surface, a high flow resolution can be achieved – down to 1mm accuracy on the Benetton’s front wing for example.
“It lets designers concentrate on the creative aspects of design without getting bogged down with the donkey work of producing data or drawings. Basically it means we can produce a better car in the time available,” explains Laight.