The CFD Application for Efficient Designing in the Automotive Engineering

Recently, many CFD analyses which assist mechanical designing have been carried out in every aspects of automotive engineering. While many CFD tools have been developed for easies of use and advances in CFD analyses tools continue, instances of effective design using these tools are not well discussed in the literature. This paper discusses a CFD analysis system, SC/Tetra, is equipped with an automatic hybrid mesh generator, a high-speed flow solver and a state of the art postprocessor. In SC/Tetra, the flow solver is built on a node-based finite-volume discretization method to achieve both high-speed computation and small memory consumption. The advancing-front method is applied to the automatic mesh generator. These features of efficient computation are desired to achieve shorter design times. Discussions are made after performing sample computations of a torque converter for an automobile, which presents difficulties for efficient CFD analysis. The difficulties are based on the numerical modeling, the mesh generation and retaining the accuracy of the computational result. SC/Tetra is optimized for effective computation and copes with these difficulties with adequate strategies. CFD tools will be able to give more parametric data to accelerate product design processes and to improve products.