Daimler-Chrysler, Jaguar-Ford, VW-Skoda … the list goes on as mergers and acquisitions reshape the worldwide automotive industry. It is now truly a global industry with design frequently being done in one location, manufacture at another, and sales perhaps being dominated by a third continent. Issues such as environmental efficiency, compact design, safety, customized niche vehicles, and style all have to be accommodated in the design envelope, in an industry that is market-driven. Critical to the success of an automotive company is its design and development process. Reliable and robust engineering designs need to be created quickly and cost effectively, usually through the collaboration of several sites around the world.

Today, the automotive industry is faced with more demanding performance and design targets than ever before, especially in the areas of:

• Shortening design times through optimized virtual design processes
• Ensuring good fuel consumption in conventional engines and resultant favorable underhood characteristics
• Implementing stylish automotive shapes with good aerodynamic characteristics
• Making improvements to drag coefficients while allowing for better ground clearances, low component temperatures, high cabin visibility, and minimal space restrictions
• Enhancing driving comfort via reduction of wind noise, minimized self-fouling and reduced interior heating via solar radiation
• Improving driving dynamics and safety without adversely affecting aerodynamics and drag
• Making environmentally friendly compact cars
• Introducing fuel cell alternatives to IC engines

CFD and other computational CAD/CAM design techniques emerged in the 1980s and quickly became adopted by automotive companies. At the time, they were hindered by slow hardware, poor real-world geometrical definition, and flow modeling codes with limited capabilities. By the year 2000, this landscape had changed. CFD is now very much a design tool embedded within in-house design processes at all major automotive manufacturers and their suppliers. The use of CFD and its benefits are very much taken for granted these days and the focus has shifted towards increasing turn-around times, optimizing simulations, and minimizing expensive experimental testing and prototyping. An explosion of flow modeling applications in the automotive industry has occurred in various areas involving flow and heat transfer. In addition, demands for up-to-date hardware networking technology at automotive CFD sites are unprecedented in order to solve multimillion node simulations routinely. Wide area network, or WAN technology, is allowing for global intranet-based CFD usage for automotive employees located across the world. This allows all flow modeling resources to be accessed throughout the world wherever the core competencies reside.

Automotive CFD practitioners are demanding robust, reliable codes along with expert technical support local to the user base for fast response times. A network of automotive support facilities across the industrialized nations of the world is therefore essential to meet the industry’s needs. Moreover, the demand to couple CFD codes with in-house modules and third party software is increasing, as is the need to customize physical models for users’ specific applications. Another trend that is gaining popularity, especially in Europe, is the formation of consortia of leading automotive manufacturers who demand that software vendors do blind benchmarking exercises, like the recent EADE tests in which several worldwide Fluent offices participated.

The articles in this supplement were selected to illustrate the range of automotive applications that are currently being addressed by engineers around the world using software from Fluent. From windshield wipers to exhaust systems, the design of most automotive components is now benefiting from CFD analysis.

FluentNEWS Supplement