Fortunately, CFD has largely replaced this expensive process, but care is required to ensure accurate replication of the physics of vehicle flow. This is a very costly exercise wind tunnel time is very expensive, as are the costs associated with constructing the scale models and hiring technicians to run the tests and crunch the numbers. They would build scale models of candidate shapes and measure the drag of these candidates in the wind tunnel. In part 2, I am going to demonstrate some of the nuances for correctly setting up a “Virtual Wind Tunnel” in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation.īefore the widespread adoption of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), engineers who sought to explore the aerodynamics of different vehicle shapes would typically book testing time at a wind tunnel facility.
In part 1 of this Blog article I investigated the drag characteristics of the Tesla Cybertruck and explored how symmetry boundary conditions can be used to speed up a flow analysis project in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation.
