Case Study: Intelligent Light achieves rapid automated CFD workflows and new racing-wheel aerodynamic insights with Altair

Highly automated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workflows enable the discovery of flow behaviors, improving wheel aerodynamics

Intelligent Light, a CFD post‑processing developer, needed to make detailed aerodynamic analysis of bicycle wheels practical for product development: wind‑tunnel testing was costly and traditional CFD workflows were too slow to evaluate hundreds of design variables across multiple wheel, fork and yaw‑angle combinations. Working with vendor Altair and using Altair’s AcuSolve solver together with Intelligent Light’s FieldView post‑processing (offered as AcuFieldView to AcuSolve users), the team set out to automate a repeatable workflow capable of handling terabytes of data from steady and unsteady simulations.

Altair’s AcuSolve integrated with FieldView/AcuFieldView automation (FVX scripting, parallel post‑processing and XDB data management) allowed batch, concurrent post‑processing while solutions were generated, cutting iterations from weeks to days. The Altair-enabled workflow uncovered new flow phenomena (an unexpected vertical force transition and high‑resolution periodic structures), drove design changes used by Zipp to refine its Firecrest wheels, and produced measurable benefits — front‑half drag down by a few percent and back‑half drag reduced by about 50% — while dramatically accelerating analysis and data handling.

Intelligent Light