Red Hot Braking News: STAR-CD helps Renault F1 Team to second consecutive win

March 21 2005, London England.

As Fernando Alonso clocked up the second consecutive victory for the Renault F1 Team, CD-adapco are proud to announce that, while the remainder of the grid use Computational Fluid Dynamics to speed their cars up, the Renault F1 Team has scorched to successive victories by using STAR-CD to slow their cars down.

In the extreme environments of both Malaysia and Australia, maintaining the brakes at the correct operating temperature was a critical part of the Renault F1's winning performance. For each race, the choice of cooling strategy was based upon months of fine-tuning through STAR-CD simulation at the Renault F1 Team’s Enstone headquarters, and represents the best compromise between effective cooling and the aerodynamic penalty for the car.

STAR-CD is currently the most successful CFD code in F1: of the 78 points awarded so far this season, an incredible 48 have gone to the drivers of STAR-CD assisted cars. Although every major F1 team uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (alongside wind-tunnel testing) as a standard tool for optimizing the aerodynamic performance of their racing cars, the simulation of brake cooling has, up until recently, been a cutting-edge application, beyond the reach of many F1 teams.

For Jarrod Murphy, Head of CFD Applications for the Renault F1 team, repeatability is key: "Because STAR-CD's trimmed cell technology is based around a core-hexahedral structure, blocks containing entire components can simply be "lifted out" of the mesh and replaced with revised meshes of just that section. This dramatically reduces run-times and ultimately makes CFD the only viable tool for this type of analysis."

" We are very proud of our association with the Renault F1 Team and congratulate them on an outstanding start to the 2005 season", says Dr Dennis Nagy, Vice President of Marketing for CD-adapco. "STAR-CD helped influence which driver ends up standing atop the winner's podium. This result further confirms our position as technology leaders in the field of automotive aerodynamics and engine simulation."