The Zenotech team will be presenting industry-standard test cases at the 2nd Automotive CFD Prediction Workshop (AutoCFD 2) on 25 and 26 August. Ultimately, this work will key into the production of more efficient cars; optimisation is vital with the shift to electric vehicles as improved aerodynamic performance influences the range.
Following the successful first workshop held in Oxford last year, the main objective of this hybrid workshop is to assess the predictive capability of CFD codes for road-car geometries and to provide practical modelling guidelines, for instance, best-practice in turbulence modelling, meshing, and numerical schemes.
Zenotech’s Director and Co-founder, Jamil Appa, and Lead CFD Engineer, Oliver Darbyshire will be participating in the workshop and sharing Zenotech data for comparison with the other participants. They will be running cases with both industry-standard turbulence models as well as high-fidelity eddy-resolving methods. The former cannot predict the flow separation on the boot/rear of the car effectively, whereas eddy-resolving methods perform better, although they are considerably more expensive to run. With Zenotech’s products, the industry can gain an advantage here in price/performance by running on GPUs.
The impact on the industry is improved flow and drag predictions from CFD that can be obtained at lower cost, allowing more design iterations in simulation and ultimately more efficient vehicles. The aerodynamic performance has a notable impact on the car’s range, and therefore optimisation is critical for the industry as they ramp up the production of electric vehicles. The efficiency of vehicles will become increasingly important for consumers in terms of lower energy consumption and a longer range. Industry leaders – the Tesla Model S, Porsche Taycan, and Mercedes EQS – are all looking to continually improve drag numbers and these advances in CFD tech will further optimise performance.
The event will bring the CFD community together – from both the academic side and industry- to discuss the future applications of these technological advances.
We look forward to sharing more about this event and our work with automotive brands soon. You can find out more about the CFD workshop here.
