Peter Machin, Senior CFD Engineer, Arrows Formula One Team, Oxfordshire, UK

The Formula One racing calendar consists of 17 grueling races across four continents. The only goal of each team is for its car to win. The teams are focused on building racing cars to compete at the pinnacle of motorsport. There are many factors that must be considered in designing such a highly complex machine. The designers’ aim is to make the car the fastest around every corner, on every lap. Driver ability, weather conditions, and luck play a part, but the performance of the car is paramount.

In recent years, the Arrows Formula One Team has used FLUENT to maximize performance. The majority of our team’s work has been in the area of wing design, with a particular focus on assessing the level of downforce and its effect on the performance of the car. Over half of the car’s total downforce is due to the wings. However, the production of downforce comes with an associated drag force penalty. The aim of the designer is to find wings that generate more downforce with a minimum increase in drag, which on the racetrack could mean the difference between a place on the podium or not.

Without CFD, many more wing prototypes would have to be constructed and tested, which would be very time consuming and expensive at a time when the focus is on ever-shortening design cycle times. Before CFD, all F1 wings were very similar and based on ground-effect wing profiles published in the public domain. Thanks to CFD, designers can predict exactly which performance improvements will accompany every wing shape modification, no matter how subtle. Indeed, we can usually expect better than 90% accuracy on wing element forces before putting them in the wind tunnel. FLUENT has also been used to provide accurate load data for our stress department, and forces on other parts of the car.

One important issue that all Formula One teams must focus on is safety. Ultimately, safety comes first and the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) has laid down clear rules to which each team must adhere. Each race season, CFD is used to optimize the racing car design within the FIA regulations. In recent years, it has been particularly useful in reacting to aerodynamic rule changes that have further limited the size and number of wing elements on the car to reduce cornering speeds.

At Arrows, our longterm objective with CFD software is to carry out much more detailed fullcar work. We regularly do simulations of 10 million cells and plan to expand to 30 million cells in the near future as we tackle larger problems and look at existing ones with finer mesh resolution. It is our belief that as FLUENT becomes more widely used on such areas as radiator cooling flows, it will become as common as CAD on the designer’s desktop computer.

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