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By Werner Seibert, Global Automotive Segment Manager, Fluent Inc.,
and Keith Hanna, Fluent News
View the pdf of this article
Aerodynamics of a Jaguar XK8 Meshed in Harpoon, visualized in EnSight,
courtesy of Sharc Ltd.
The 2005 EACC attendees
The 2nd European Automotive CFD Conference (EACC) was recently held in
Frankfurt, Germany, drawing over 270 delegates from around the world,
almost nwice as many as the first conference in 2003. Universally acclaimed
as a success with over 25 applied automotive CFD papers, a 400 page Proceedings
volume, and 11 keynote speakers, the EACC is now the biggest automotive
CFD event in the world. The increased use of CFD in the automotive industry
has resulted in remarkable growth rates of CFD usage, approaching 35%
globally over the last two years, with the segment growing faster than
the overall CFD sector. This trend was reflected in the unprecedented
number of papers accepted for this year’s EACC – over 50% more
papers than in 2003.
Experimental and CFD predictions of defrosting (liquid fraction) on a
windshield during a car cabin heat-up cycle
Courtesy of ŠkodaAuto
This year’s conference covered many facets of modern applied CFD,
Computer Aided
Engineering (CAE) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Other clear
trends evident
included the ongoing efforts within automotive companies to capture knowledge
in the
form of virtual processes and design systems. This in turn resonates with
the industry’s
drive towards global PLM and efforts to encapsulate CFD (and CAE) processes
into consistent
and repeatable product development systems. Many presenters illustrated
customized
design tools aimed at defining and deploying their company’s know-how
and
intellectual property. In addition, a number of papers showed how FLUENT
is being coupled
with other intermediate third party CAE software and in-house tools commonly
used in the automotive industry.
The need to continually shorten design cycles to improve company productivity
and cut
costs is paramount in the automotive industry. The ultimate Holy Grail
is to deliver a total
virtual design prototyping process, including multiple engineering design
optimization
steps, all within a timeframe of hours or days rather than weeks, months
or years. Several
papers showed innovations and CFD technology advances aimed at indirectly
hitting this
goal by speeding up current meshing and CAD bottlenecks, improving multi-variable
process optimization, and producing customized automotive CFD application
design tools.
The broadening of automotive CFD away from its traditional application
strongholds of
external aerodynamics, powertrain, climate control, underhood thermal
management
and exhaust after-treatment was also seen to be happening at the EACC.
There were a
number of non-traditional automotive CFD applications, especially in the
area of multiphase
transport phenomena. Such applications as dirt deposition, defrosting,
and diesel
filter build-up were among the topics covered. Automotive parts manufacturing
also
showed an upsurge of applied CFD usage using POLYFLOW and FLUENT in the
form of
design studies related to glass windshield manufacturing, fuel tank thermoforming,
seal
extrusion, and cabin trim heating effects. In the area of aeroacoustics,
several papers
illustrated how CFD flow predictions are being coupled today with third
party software
to interpret automotive noise and wind buffeting. Other aspects of cabin
comfort were
examined too, including thermal comfort on hot and cold days.
Affordable supercomputing has become a reality for the automotive CFD
community,
and clusters of 500 or more processors are becoming more common. Two Formula
1
motor racing teams reported on how they are moving in this direction for
competitive
motor sports simulations. As hardware performance improves and software
efficiency
rises, more transient, turbulent, aeroacoustic, multiphase, and other
numerically-intensive
CFD simulations will become a standard part of the automotive design process.
Several smaller automotive companies have introduced mini-clusters to
improve their
workflow productivity and utilize CFD cost effectively.
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