MENUTecplot, Pointwise and Stanford to Co-Host Webinar Focused on the Use of CFD Simulations to Improve Aerodynamic Efficiency
BELLEVUE, Wash. (March 24, 2016) – Tecplot, Inc. today announced that it will co-host with Pointwise, Inc. and Stanford University a webinar entitled, “The Stanford Solar Car Project’s Race for Aerodynamic Efficiency,” was recorded on April 5, 2016.
The Bridgestone World Solar Challenge
Chasing the sun 3000km across the Australian Outback is a challenge. And doing it in a solar powered vehicle is an even bigger challenge. But every two years teams from around the world converge on Darwin, Australia, to make the journey to Adelaide in the solar powered cars they have engineered specifically for the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge.
The Stanford Solar Car Project, a student-run organization, has been designing and building solar cars since 1989 and arrives in Darwin every two years with a stunning new vehicle. The latest vehicle in their lineup, Arctan, took sixth place out of 29 teams in the 2015 competition, covering the 3000km in just over 41 hours.
With the aerodynamics of the vehicle playing a critical role in its performance, the Stanford Solar Car Project team developed a repeatable simulation driven design framework consisting of Pointwise for rapid hybrid grid generation, Stanford’s open-source CFD code (SU2) to run the CFD simulations, and Tecplot 360 to post-process and interpret the results.
Attendees of this webinar will learn about the framework that enabled the Stanford team to analyze over 40 design iterations in detail and make informed engineering decisions, which improved the aerodynamic efficiency of the final design, ultimately culminating in Arctan.
Specific topics covered in the webinar include:
- Stanford Solar Car Project history and the engineering challenges faced when designing Arctan.
- Generation of repeatable, high quality, hybrid viscous meshes using T-Rex with Pointwise.
- The setup of SU2 for solving the incompressible RANS equations and computing surface sensitivities for design.
- How to extract solution information from SU2 output using Tecplot 360.
About Pointwise, Inc.
Pointwise is solving the top problem facing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) today – reliably generating high-fidelity meshes. The company’s Pointwise software generates structured, unstructured and hybrid meshes; interfaces with CFD solvers, such as ANSYS FLUENT, STAR-CCM+, ANSYS CFX, OpenFOAM, and SU2 as well as many neutral formats, such as CGNS; runs on Windows (Intel and AMD), Linux (Intel and AMD), and Mac, and has a scripting language, Glyph, that can automate CFD meshing. Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide rely on Pointwise as their complete CFD preprocessing solution.
For more information, visit www.pointwise.com.
About Tecplot, Inc.
Founded in 1981 by former Boeing engineers Don Roberts and Mike Peery, who today serve as CEO and chairman of the board, respectively, Tecplot is the leading developer of CFD visualization and analysis software for engineers and scientists. Tecplot’s products allow customers using desktop computers and laptops to quickly analyze and understand information hidden in complex data, and communicate their results to others via brilliant images and compelling animations. The privately held company’s products are used by more than 47,000 technical professionals around the world.
Tecplot has been awarded numerous Small Business Innovation Research contracts from DOD, NASA, DARPA, and the National Science Foundation. In 2012, the company was named a Red Herring Top 100 Americas Award winner.
Since its founding more than 30 years ago, Tecplot has consistently delivered category-leading innovation to the engineering and scientific communities. Examples of this never-ending innovation include Tecplot 360 for lightning-fast analysis of massive CFD simulation data, Tecplot RS for oil & gas reservoir simulation, Tecplot Chorus for analyzing multiple simulations of design-space exploration data, and Tecplot Focus for automating routine data analysis and plotting tasks.
Stanford Solar Car Project | SU2