BMW Sauber F1 team credits engineering simulation for doubled points

Prior to the season, the BMW Sauber F1 Team signed an extended agreement with Fluent Deutschland, a subsidiary of ANSYS, to use Fluent CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software to run simulations on its new supercomputer – one of the largest in Europe – rather than invest in a second wind tunnel. As a result, the team was able to run increasingly complex engineering simulations of race car aerodynamics far quicker than was previously possible. That, in turn, enabled the team to analyse and implement design changes more quickly, and hence the performance. “The launch of our latest supercomputer was a decisive reinforcement of our CFD capacity,” says Mario Theissen, BMW Motorsport Director. “Unlike other teams, we didn’t plan to build a second wind tunnel. Instead, we have used … ANSYS to continue to develop and exploit the expanding potential for CFD that high-performance computing gives us.” He adds that wind tunnel testing will continue as an important design element for its F1 racing car design. “The big difference with CFD compared to wind tunnels is that you not only get results, but also an understanding of what goes on,” he says. To optimise the performance of the Fluent CFD software, the BMW Sauber F1 Team invested in a custom-built supercomputer, called Albert2, the successor to its original Albert supercomputer developed in 2004. Powered by 512 Intel Xeon 5160 dual core processors, Albert2 is five and a half times more powerful, and three times faster, than the first Albert. Albert2 was designed to run CFD simulations using the latest version of Fluent. It can make 12,288,000,000,000 calculations per second. Theoretically, the BMW Sauber F1 Team could run simulations approaching, and even exceeding, the landmark figure of 1 billion cells. When Fluent became the first CFD software tool to be used in F1 – by the Benetton team of 1992 – simulations of only 100,000 cells were possible, such as the analysis of a front wing.