Case Study: Illini Solar Car achieves rapid aerodynamic and thermal optimization (two major design changes in 2 weeks) with SimScale

Illini Solar Car team used SimScale CFD to optimize internal and external flow of their car design

Illini Solar Car, a student-run team from the University of Illinois building road-legal solar vehicles like their first car Argo, needed a way to optimize external aerodynamics and internal cooling without access to a full-size wind tunnel. To meet that challenge they turned to SimScale, using the SimScale CFD platform (OpenFOAM-based) to simulate external shell aerodynamics, center-of-lift and crosswind stability as well as internal ducting and thermal behavior of electrical enclosures.

Using SimScale’s cloud CFD tools the team ran incompressible flow simulations (meshing with parametric hexahedral refinements, symmetry plane savings and the simpleFoam solver) to iterate their design quickly. The work exposed two major aerodynamic design changes, produced an optimized design in about 2 weeks, and accelerated development while reducing the need for physical prototyping; Illini Solar Car now plans to continue using SimScale for internal and external flow optimization and training new members.

Illini Solar Car

Joel Khristy

Aerodynamics Engineer