2017 World Solar Challenge: proudly supporting student teams on their adventure of a lifetime
The world’s best solar car teams are driving into Adelaide today, 4-5 days after they started their journey in Darwin, and 2+ years after commencing their initial planning and engineering design following the 2015 competition. Congratulations to all the teams - read more about the simulation work done by committed student teams in the lead-up to this pioneering race.
Monash Motorsport take out "Best Use of Virtual Methods to Achieve Vehicle Targets" award at Silverstone
We are pleased to announce that long term partners of LEAP Australia, Monash Motorsport, have achieved a very respectable fifth place overall in the 2014 Formula Student Competition at Silverstone in the UK. Among the awards presented at the competition was one for the best use of virtual methods to achieve vehicle targets which was won by Monash Motorsport. With their advanced use of ANSYS CFD Tools for external and internal aerodynamics, as well as ANSYS Mechanical to evaluate part strength and performance before manufacture, Monash Motorsport has always placed a high emphasis on the use of computational tools as a means to achieve top results. Receiving the award was a testament to the hard work that the team members had dedicated to the project, and indicative of the value that motorsport engineers place on simulation tools. LEAP congratulate Monash Motorsport on their successful 2014 campaign, and look forward to working together in the future. The team behind this outstanding result is currently preparing for the upcoming Formula Student Competition in Germany, for which LEAP wishes them the best of...
Guest Post: ANSYS CFD helps Sunswift tackle the World Solar Challenge
Issue 1 of ANSYS Advantage magazine places the spotlight on the academic use of CFD and other ANSYS software. Part of this issue is dedicated to student engineering competitions where students have the chance to use real-world engineering methods and tools such as CFD to design cutting-edge products, including race cars (FSAE) and solar passenger vehicles (World Solar Challenge). Many of you may know that LEAP Australia has for years been a strong supporter of the University of New South Wales' Sydney-based Solar Racing Team - otherwise known as Sunswift - especially during the design and development of their latest car, Sunswift eVe. LEAP provides students with training and mentoring in CFD and FEA software, and helped implement effective CAD-to-CFD workflows and optimisation approaches in Workbench. In this guest post, Dr. Graham Doig of UNSW's School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering shares further insights into Sunswift's use of ANSYS CFD software to design what is one of the world's lowest-drag passenger vehicles. Dr. Doig is the academic supervisor for the race-winning, record-holding team - he teaches CFD and experimental aerodynamics as well as leading research at the Fluids Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Projects, and guided the core solar car aerodynamics crew of undergraduate engineers Pujith Vijayaratnam, James Keogh, Taryn Zhao and Matt Cruickshank, who were also mentored by former Formula One CFD engineer and Sunswift alumnus Dr. Sammy Diasinos of Macquarie University. Sunswift is a student-run project to design and build solar racing cars. The flagship event for the solar car fraternity is the biennial World Solar Challenge (or WSC) rally, a silent gruelling zoom across outback Australia - 3000kms from Darwin in the Northern Territory to Adelaide in South Australia - using the power of the sun to propel an international assortment of between 40 and 50 vehicles ranging from the sleek to the wacky. Power is extremely limited, so aerodynamic efficiency is king. Sunswift started out in the mid-1990's, and in recent years has had an astonishing run of success - in 2009 our one-seater prototype Sunswift IVy won its class in the WSC, repeating that feat in 2011 and breaking a Guinness World Record for the Fastest Solar-Powered Vehicle in the interim. Put simply, we felt we'd taken things as far as we could building the "traditional" spaceship-like vehicles that have dominated solar car racing in the modern era. Basically a wing covered in solar panels with shrouded wheels underneath, European and Japanese cars of this design with several times the budget of our Aussie underdogs had been able to use satellite-grade solar cells and expensive, cutting-edge battery technology to beat us comfortably in the overall standings, despite...
New & Improved: The 2014 FIA Formula One Series
This weekend, televisions around the world will tune into to watch the first race of the 2014 FIA Formula One Championship take place in Melbourne, Australia. Of particular interest to all F1 fans will be the new looking cars with their revolutionary new power units. Formula One has undergone another drastic change in the rules, prompting engine manufacturers to clean-sheet design an integrated turbocharged electric-combustion powertrain system. Of course in addition to the new engine specifications, the governing body also revised the rules controlling the size and shape of the allowable external aerodynamics package. As a result of these rule changes, each team's aerodynamics departments have been forced to perform a complete overhaul of the aerodynamics of their car. In this video, Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo and world champion Sebastian Vettel from Red Bull Racing explain the most significant changes to the 2014 FIA rules: As they are constantly striving to improve on-track performance, and given the extreme time constraints of competitive motorsport, the traditional product design process of "design-manufacture-evaluate-redesign" does not allow enough potential designs to be evaluated by F1 teams to remain competitive. By leveraging a Simulation Driven Product Design process, F1 teams are testing more designs in faster timeframes, and thus more efficiently working to optimise the final design and extract maximum possible performance within the new rules. Of all the engineering challenges present in F1 racecar engineering, this advantage is most prominent in the field of fluid dynamics: affecting both external aerodynamics and internal flows. Given that the engine dimensions and fuel tank size are now even more strictly controlled, in order for a team to get more power out of the engine than their competitor, they must put more fuel and air into the engine. For every tenth of a gram of air that the team can force into the engine per cycle, approximately 13 extra kilowatts of shaft power can be produced. While not all of that energy makes it into the rear wheels, the resulting increase in power is still immense. To deliver the most air into the cylinder, it is now legal for teams to compress the air by use of a turbocharger (a change which is welcomed by many fans who love that turbo sound!). For optimum turbocharger design, engineers turn to ANSYS CFD and associated Workbench design tools such as the TurboTools suite which provides highly advanced integrated tools including BladeGen/BladeModeller, TurboGrid, special Turbo Pre and Post-Processing Macros as well as Vista tools. ANSYS CFD allows turbocharger designers a faster turnaround on designs and works on templates that produce dependably accurate results. For external aerodynamics, the advantage...
CFD keeps Emirates Team New Zealand on course to reclaim the America's Cup
LEAP staff, in particular our team of CFD engineers, have been watching with interest as the 2013 America's Cup unfolds in San Francisco. Despite being the oldest active trophy in international sport, the America's Cup is continually evolving thanks to an often dramatic combination of ...
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