Release 2023 R1: Vehicle – Aero and Water

Automatic report generation has been extended to include the vehicle aerodynamics solution. It enables a fully automated report generation and saves you a lot of time when post-processing the simulation results. It can only be used in conjunction with the Vehicle Aerodynamics workflow app. The automatically generated report includes 3D results (Figure 1) in terms of pressure, velocity and TKE on the surface, contour plots at the center, and other characteristic planes and Cd/Cl diagrams, all scaled automatically according to the specific geometry and conditions.

Figure 1: Example of an automatically generated report for the assessment of aerodynamic performance

The formula for additional, averaged quantities is added to the model setup. Currently, absolute pressure, velocity, turbulent kinetic energy, turbulent dissipation rate and viscosity are averaged. The starting iteration for averaging is defined in the GUI. Note that the averaging is also available for steady RANS calculations, which is very useful in the event the solution oscillates slightly around a mean value (see Figure 2). 

Default wind tunnels can be automatically created with the "Create tunnel" button in Geometry Definition. The button becomes active after the "Vehicle surface" has been defined, since the tunnel size is computed based on the vehicle size. You can also use your own tunnel surface, select the "Use custom tunnel surface" check box and then provide the surface mesh of the wind tunnel.

A background image can be added to line charts to put the displayed data into context. The image zooms and pans with the chart, can be shown in front of or behind the grid, and can be made semi-transparent. This visualization is very useful when analyzing aerodynamic performance data such as accumulated drag and lift coefficients, or some local quantities of interest like pressure coefficient.