Scale Resolving CFD and CAA processes for Ground Vehicles based on Open Source

Creo Dynamics [1] is a Swedish engineering company with core competence in fluid dynamics, acoustics and structural dynamics. Creo Dynamics has broad experience from participating in national and international research programmes focussing on the development of new emerging technologies for the automotive or aerospace industries. In the company, experienced engineers develop and deliver simulation tools and procedures – often based on open source software [2] – which are tailored towards specific needs and applications; this process always involves maintaining a conscious balance between turn-around time and accuracy. Creo Dynamics has recently undertaken a PRACE SHAPE project together with application experts from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. During the course of the project we developed templates and “recipes” for a range of tasks that are involved in the automotive industry – such as automated handling of computer-aided design (CAD), parallel meshing, solving and post-processing. These were all tailored towards a particular automotive application, namely the aerodynamics of a heavy-duty semi-trailer. We also focused on parallel implementations and executions for large-scale simulations. In addition to monitoring the efficiency of the processes (for meshing and solving run-time performance and scalability) and identifying critical bottlenecks, we gave significant attention to pinpointing performance deficits in the processes so as to give guidance for a further fine-tuning of the overall methodology