Team Swinburne is a university student-run organisation that designs, builds and competes with a formula-style electric race car each year. Based out of Swinburne University of Technology’s Hawthorn campus, the team offers students the opportunity to learn skills in design, manufacturing and project management while competing in the Formula SAE-A competition each December. The team have been building Formula SAE vehicles since 2000 and have been producing fully electric cars since 2011 – the two most recent of which have been 4-wheel drive vehicles.

Over the last several years, Ansys have been a pivotal part of the Team Swinburne family, providing us with their extremely powerful simulation software packages and learning pathways. This technology is critical as it allows us to validate our designs, saving invaluable amounts of time and resources from being spent on unreliable designs which would only be validated post manufacture.

There is a broad range of functionality within the software suite that Ansys provides, including CFD for fluid dynamics, FEA for structural mechanics, electromagnetics simulation & more. In this blog, we will focus on how Team Swinburne uses Ansys Fluent for our Aerodynamic Package development. Ansys Fluent software is essential to our design cycle, as Aerodynamic component design is an iterative process that requires quick and detailed analysis of designs. Hence, simulations through Ansys Fluent provide us with reliable data to keep track of performance as well as a benchmark to verify real life testing with.

For relatively small teams like ours who don’t have access to wind tunnel testing facilities, without CFD we would be completely unable to effectively verify our aerodynamic package. Without a proper benchmark or thorough understanding of the airflow around the car, we would be unable to evaluate any aerodynamic performance gains. At the very least, we would resort to detailed theoretical research and validations, supplemented by approximations of other teams’ designs, none of which would account for parameters specific to our car.

Given the flawed and inaccurate design process available to us without CFD, we would be unable to justify the high production cost and time spent on developing full scale aerodynamic prototypes pursuing performance gains which can’t be qualitatively or quantitatively supported in the first place. In contrast, CFD allows us to test countless iterations with clear data to backup how each design change brings us closer to our performance goals in the yearly development cycle.

Unlike most simulation software on the market, Ansys provides a user-friendly way to interact with specific parameters such as boundary conditions and flow conditions, which in turn allows us to replicate real-life conditions exceptionally well. Their post processing features such as graphics (Figure 1 – 3) and animations similarly support in the qualitative analysis of designs. For example, aerodynamic factors such as pressure gradients along surfaces, vortices formation, and air direction can be well visualized to gain a better understanding of how well all our aerodynamics elements are functioning as a complete system.