The use of computational tools in industrial flow simulations
is well established. As engineering design continues to
evolve and become ever more complex there is an
increasing demand for more accurate transient flow
simulations. It can, using existing methods, be extremely
costly in computational terms to achieve sufficient accuracy
in these simulations. Accordingly, advanced engineering
industries, such as the F1 industry, is looking to academia
to develop the next generation of techniques which may
provide a mechanism for more accurate simulations without
excessive increases in cost.
Currently, the most established methods for industrial flow
simulations, including F1, are based upon the Reynolds
Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations which are at the
heart of most commercial codes. There is naturally an
implicit assumption in this approach of a steady state
solution. In practice, however, many industrial problems
involve unsteady or transient flows which the RANS
techniques are not well equipped to deal with. In order to
therefore address increasing demand for more physical
models in engineering design, commercial codes do include
unsteady extensions such as URANS (Unsteady RANS), and
Direct Eddy Simulation (DES). Unfortunately even on high
performance computing facilities these types of
computational models require significantly more execution
time which, to date, has not been matched with a
corresponding increase in accuracy of a level sufficient to
justify this costs. Particularly when considering the
computing restrictions the F1 rules impose on the race car
design.
Alternative transient simulation techniques have been
developed within research and academic communities over
the past few decades. These methods have generally been
applied to more academic transient flow simulations with a
significantly reduced level of turbulence modelling. As the
industrial demand for transient simulations becomes greater
and the computer "power per $" improves, alternative
computational techniques, not yet widely adopted by
industry, are likely to provide a more cost effective tool from
the perspective of computational time for a high level of
accuracy.
In this presentation we will outline the demands imposed
on computational aerodynamics within the highly
competitive F1 race car design and discuss the next
generation of transient flow modelling that the industry is
looking to impact on this design cycle.
Prof. Spencer Sherwin
Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London
Spencer Sherwin is the McLaren Racing/Royal Academy of
Engineering Research Chair in the Department of
Aeronautics at Imperial College London. He received his
MSE and PhD from the Department of Mechanical and
Aerospace Engineering Department at Princeton University.
During his time at Imperial he has maintained a successful
research program into the development and application of
the high order spectral/hp element techniques with
particular application to separated unsteady aerodynamics,
biomedical flow and understanding flow physics through
instability analysis.
Professor Sherwin’s research group (www.sherwinlab.info)
also develops and distributes the openware spectral/hp
element package Nektar++ (www.nektar.info) which has
been applied to direct numerical simulation and stability
analysis to a range of applications including vortex flows of
relevance to offshore engineering and vehicle aerodynamics
and biomedical flows associated with arterial atherosclerosis.
He has published over 120 peer-reviewed papers in
international journals covering topics from numerical
analysis to applied and fundamental fluid mechanics and co
authored a highly cited book on the spectral/hp element
method. Currently he is an associate director of the
EPSRC/Airbus funded Laminar Flow Control Centre and is
the chair of the EPSRC Platform for Research in Simulation
Methods (PRISM) at Imperial College London
(www.prism.ac.uk).
Speaker:
Prof.
Spencer Sherwin
(Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London)