The Appropriate Use of CFD in the Automotive Design Process

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations have the potential to provide highly-resolved representations of the complete flow field around a vehicle. However, this comes at a cost: even with substantial computing resources it is not practical to match the throughput of conventional wind-tunnels.

One way of redressing this is to extract the maximum value from each simulation. This paper explores a structured approach to this task, illustrating it with examples from Jaguar Land Rover programmes. It shows, through the example of the Jaguar XF programme that a combination of simulation and relatively simple full-scale wind-tunnel testing, can deliver competitive aerodynamic performance.