Integrated CAD/CFD Visualisation of a Generic Formula 1 Car Front Wheel Flowfield

As part of a detailed project investigating racing car wheel aerodynamics, a CAD/CFD (Computer Aided Design—Computational Fluid Dynamics) interface has been used to enable CFD numerical flow visualisation for a generic racing car geometry. The interface was developed and improved through assessment and integration of industrial and baseline CAD formats with the requirements of an in-house state-of-the-art unstructured Navier-Stokes CFD package. The resulting CFD solution was proved to correlate well with experimental visualisation, and was useful in optimising a front spoiler. The time taken to move from an initial geometry definition to a CFD solution was reduced from typical times, for the types of geometry tested, by a factor of about five.