Virtual wind-tunnel tests and HPC facilities: open-source solutions for massive automotive performance analysis

Francesco Pasqua, Roberto Pieri

SCS Italy

Raffaele Ponzini
CINECA

Virtual wind-tunnel can be considered the workhorse of automotive designers, who need the cutting-edge technologies to improve their productivity and reduce costs, testing a large set of shape solutions to evaluate the performance modification. To support this kind of activity SCS developed a complete workflow for automotive applications at a motorsport level. The focus of the proposed solution for CFD quasi-steady-state RANS simulations is on giving designers a robust, cheap, automatised virtual tool, scalable to any kind of request.

The workflow selected is based on open-source code, namely OpenFOAM, and is able to take efficiently full advantage of state-of-the art HPC facilities up to hundreds of computational cores. It handles the whole simulations steps, from pre- to post-processing, in a fully automatic fashion.

The technological solution presented herein has been tested on the DrivAer Model, a modular car concept developed by the TUM (Technische Universität München), in terms of accuracy, robustness and scalability.

The obtained results are effective, showing that the proposed solution is ready to be adopted and deployed at industrial level.

Back to Program