Franco Bercella, Bercella S.r.l., Varano Melegari, Italy

Bercella S.r.l. is a company which specializes in the manufacture of advanced composite materials, in particular glass and carbon fibre. A CFD operation is unusual in the middle of a "hard" prototyping environment like ours, with robotic systems for composite foil cutting, milling machines and autoclaves. However, we decided to advance not only in materials expertise, but also on their interaction with surrounding environment - air or water (by calculating pressures with CFD, and therefore the acting forces on materials).

Performing CFD simulations provides insight into our products before we deliver them to our customers and therefore enables us to meet the demanding quality requirements of the application sectors of composite materials: racing cars, motorbikes, helmets, etc.

Nobody would have thought that a company like ours, which originally only focused on physical prototyping, would have been able to set up a CFD environment, but here we are today using es-aero for virtual prototyping of wing profiles and complete car body aerodynamics for competition racing cars. We mainly use es-aero on Linux and run STAR-HPC on a cluster of PCs.

Thanks to CD-adapco's support, we are now looking forward to future challenges in the automotive and other sectors.