Case Study: iconCFD achieves rapid mapping of adjoint sensitivities and rear‑wing drag/downforce optimization with CAESES

iconCFD - Customer Case Study

iconCFD tackled the aerodynamic optimization of a hyper sports car rear wing, seeking an optimal balance between minimizing drag and maximizing downforce. CAESES was used to create a parametric rear‑wing model (19 intuitive profile parameters with built‑in span and chord constraints) while iconCFD provided the adjoint CFD computations to supply sensitivity data.

CAESES mapped the adjoint sensitivities from iconCFD directly onto the user‑defined geometry parameters via its Sensitivity Computation, quickly identifying the top‑5 most influential variables. Using that insight, CAESES produced two design variants: one that reduced drag by ~1% but lowered downforce by ~5.8%, and one that increased downforce by ~5.9% while slightly improving drag (~‑0.03%). The CFD runs used ~1.8M cells (primal ~7 h, adjoint ~3 h on 64 CPUs), demonstrating CAESES’ efficient coupling of parametric CAD and adjoint results for measurable design gains.

iconCFD