Technical Paper
Scale-Resolved and Time-Averaged Simulations of the Flow over a NASCAR Cup Series Racecar
2023-04-11
2023-01-0735
In spite of growing popularity of scale resolved transient simulations, like the Detached Eddy Simulation (DES), among the mainstream automotive OEMs for the aerodynamic optimization of the production vehicles, Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations is still the most widely used Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach in motorsports. This is partially due to the usage-limitations imposed by the sanctioning bodies like, the FIA and NASCAR, restricting not only the hours of wind tunnel operation but also limiting the amount of CFD compute resource. This, coupled with speed requirements for aerodynamic development prevent the widespread use of scale-resolved modeling, such as Large Eddy Simulation (LES) or Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) methodologies that require an order of magnitude more computational resources.