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Old 04-04-2013, 02:12 PM   #18 (permalink)
christofoo
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kach22i View Post
Here is one specific to drag on electric vehicles, also covers wheel openings (and more):

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wm...tationws12.pdf
Another point I notice in this doc is they used OpenFOAM for CFD - never heard of it, but found it here: The OpenFOAM&#174 Foundation. (I also could have found it just googling 'open source CFD,' though it's nice to know what Universities have chosen for CFD.) OpenFOAM is open source / free, looks easy (for me) to install or build for Linux *not for Windows*... but the learning curve appears very steep. Momentarily I couldn't find an answer to how you import solid objects into the OpenFOAM mesh generator, i.e. from a NURBS or Polygon file format, which is key. But I think I remember some separate open-source projects that stand alone as mesh generators, so I think there is a solution outside the scope of OpenFOAM. (Finally in order to delve into CFD one would have to consider how to setup some correlation between CFD and wind-tunnel data (preferably someone else's published wind-tunnel data), to ensure the computation is configured sensibly. Overall I'm not sure if it's worth the investment of (my) time, but it's always a temptation in the back of my mind... and now I know the name of a viable CFD suite...)
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