Optimal Solutions Software Winner of a 2007 Formula SAE West Award CFD Development of Turbo System for Brigham Young University Formula Racecar
Optimal Solutions Software (OSS) was a member of the BYU design team that won a prestigious Altair Engineering William R. Adam Engineering Award at the Formula SAE West competition held at the California Speedway in Fontana, California, from June 13 through June 16, 2007.
Initially conceived in 1981 as a road-racing counterpart to the established SAE Mini Baja®, FSAE has grown to more than 20 times its original size in terms of both cars and participants. Altair's William R. Adam award recognizes and rewards teams that have invested time and effort to develop new and innovative engineering concepts in vehicle design.
"This competition represents the future of innovative vehicle engineering," said Michael Heskitt, Altair's vice president of Global Engineering. "Top engineering students from all over the world are challenged here to take risks to fully develop new concepts, while adhering to sound engineering principles, exhibiting strong reasoning and properly executing the development process."
Representatives from Altair, led by University Program Manager Dr. David Schmueser, judged the contestants based on the degree of innovation, the engineering processes used and the effectiveness of those processes. In addition, judging is based on realistic engineering demands, including timing, cost, relevance to target market, production feasibility and ease of use.
The Optimal Solutions team performed a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study to design a turbo charger system. A new exhaust was designed to meet theoretical performance calculations. An intake comparison of four different designs was done seeking to balance the mass flow to each cylinder.
Sculptor, developed by Optimal Solutions Software, LLC (OSS) was used to tune the mass flow of the individual engine runners to each cylinder. The effect of the CFD and Sculptor-developed intake design and turbo system with exhaust was to balance the flow to each cylinder and to reduce the pressure drop to each cylinder.
Figure 1.0 - Overall layout of the turbo system and positions of all components. The intake shown is the first to be rapid prototyped. Notice the exhaust runners coming from the front of the engine under the transmission case and out and up into the turbo. All intake designs incorporated this layout for the turbo.
Figure 2.0 - Final exhaust design welded and mounted in place. Notice how the design follows the crank case shape along the bottom and just clears the oil filter located on the front of the engine and below the pipes.
To balance the mass flow of the individual engine runners to each cylinder, Sculptor allowed the CFD mesh geometry to be quickly deformed and then the new geometry was fed directly into the solver. The design was then optimized using a gradient based optimization algorithm imbedded in Sculptor.
Figure 3.0 - With the vane design, a balanced solution was easier to find. Left is the original shape, middle is one balanced solution by bringing the vane further down towards the turbo, right is a balanced solution allowing the vane only to move up and down. The middle one is the design that was used.
Figure 4.0 - Notice the balanced flow in the middle and right solutions.
After Sculptor produced the optimized geometry, it was read back into CAD so that it could be detail designed and exported to the rapid prototype machine.