CFD revisited

In a few othere threads i showed some of the results from some of my CFD experements of some of the formula 1 design styles in use for the new season. One of the limitations of the old software was the fact that it gave a coarse image of the airflow around the section and it also could only handle 2 dimensional sectional flows of a 1 mm thick section.

Well after fiddling with this software i broke down and bought Solidworks 2003 with the COSMOS anyalasys package. Now i can solve solutions in 3 Dimensions with finer resolution and faster processing times.

For those that are not familiar with the Term CFD it stands for "Computational Fluid Dynamics". In essense it allows you to study airflow over and around a surface with out the need for a wind tunnel. This is the same process that the aero engineers use to start the initial designs of the aero package on modern F1 cars.

So decided to pull up the old slides and compare them to the new one. Now i am using a section of 250 mm in width instead of 1 mm and have the ability to use more dimensionaly accurate drawings.

So sit back and enjoy.

Rob

 

First we will take a look at the F2004 nose. The first slide is of the old results the second it the results in the new soft ware notice how much of a hole the front wing creates behind it. the 3rd slide is the iso lines ( areas of equal airspeed )

 

Now in this slide we will look at the Williams BMW Walrus nose. In this slide it showes that by moving the nose back we can see that the air flow is now allowed to go behind the wing elements allowing and ingrease of airflow behind it and reducing drag.

 

The mesh was generated directly from a Solidworks drawing. The COSMOS FloWorks software generates the mesh directly from the drawing so it saves a lot of time in the generation of it.