The ICON Digital Wind-Tunnel Validation
2022-01-1088
03/29/2022
- Event
- Content
- The discipline of aerodynamics engineering is a cornerstone in the rapid transition of the automotive industry to emission-free technologies. The endless pursuit of maximum energy efficiency, comfort, and safety requires designers to achieve unprecedented aerodynamic characteristics for the cars of tomorrow, which would be impossible to attain using traditional development processes. In recent years, computational testing has reached a maturity level close to that of physical wind-tunnel testing with all of its’ sophistications. Complementing the data from physical testing, well-calibrated computational simulations provide opportunities to interrogate and analyze salient flow phenomena in even greater depth, and explore the design space with more flexibility. Enabling designers to easily and efficiently exploit the increasing power and range of computational simulation to achieve the emission-free objectives of the automotive industry represents a significant challenge. This talk will discuss results from extensive validation of the iconCFD® Digital Wind Tunnel (DWT) on four generic car shapes including variety of geometric modifications and wheels. Experimental data from modern full scale wind tunnel will be compared with simulation results. Detail calibration process aimed to achieve maximum consistency between real wind tunnel and its digital twin will be described. Conclusions about the importance of realistic wind tunnel geometry and empty wind tunnel flow characteristics will be presented. Different capabilities of RANS and DES approach to accurately predict crucial flow phenomena will be highlighted. In this work, we’ll also investigate the influence of the numerical schemes and solution algorithms on the results robustness over mesh variations and quality. In particular we’ll be interested by the effect of getting rid of well-known numerical artefacts such as dependency of the mass conservation equation on the under-relaxation factors as well as so-called non-orthogonal limiters. Mr Zbynek Hrncir is currently senior aerodynamicist of ICON®, one of the leading providers of CFD technology and associated processes to the automotive industry worldwide. During his last ten years in ICON he participated on aerodynamic development of many production and high-performance cars. He received his Master’s and PhD degree in Aerospace Engineering and Aerodynamics.
- Citation
- Hrncir PhD, Z., "The ICON Digital Wind-Tunnel Validation," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-1088, 2022, .