Next week Claudio Pita and I will be in the Motor City attending the SAE 2016 World Congress and Exhibition. There we will be presenting the work we performed in cooperation with Mark Landon of Optimal Solutions where we have defined a set of meshing techniques that enable robust shape deformation for design optimization.

For this study we used the DrivAer, a realistic automotive model developed by the Institute of Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at the Technische Universität München. This geometry allowed us to thoroughly explore solid modeling and surface meshing techniques and use T-Rex, Pointwise’s hybrid viscous meshing technology, to generate a high quality volume mesh that served as the baseline design. An additional 28 designs were derived from the baseline mesh using Arbitrary Shape Deformation within Sculptor, a technique developed by Optimal Solutions for performing smooth volumetric shape deformations on the mesh level while maintaining cell quality and boundary layer thickness and orientation. The aerodynamic performance of each design was computed using OpenFOAM and a design was found that resulted in a 4.4% decrease in drag over the baseline model.

The volume mesh for the DrivAer generated using Pointwise’s T-Rex meshing algorithm highlighting prisms in the boundary layer region and tetrahedra in the farfield.

The control points of the Arbitrary Shape Deformation volume highlighted in green illustrate the parameterization of the DrivAer grid model.

The paper is titled “Meshing Considerations for Automotive Shape Design Optimization” and will be presented on Wednesday, April 13^th at 1:30PM in the Design Optimization – Methods and Applications (Part 2 of 2) session in Room 312B. The session begins at 1:00PM.

Claudio and I will be wandering the exhibition floor and attending sessions that Tuesday and Wednesday. If you would like to learn more about our work and meet with us while we are in town, drop us a line on Twitter (@Pointwise) and #LetsTalkMeshing.