Automotive design applications of fluid flow simulation on parallel computing platforms Original Research Article

This article describes the use of fluid flow simulation on parallel computing platforms to solve design problems in the automotive industry. The fluid flow formulation in the SpectrumTM solver, which is used for these simulations, is described. The finite element treatment of fluid flow in this work is based on the Galerkin-Least-Squares (GLS) method with discontinuity capturing operators. The Arbitrary-Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) method is utilized to account for deformable fluid domains. Automatically generated tetrahedral grids are used to ease and expedite the analysis process. The multiphysics architecture used in this work lends itself naturally to high-performance parallel computing. By taking advantage of automatic mesh generation and parallel computing, dramatic reduction in turnaround time for flow analysis is achieved. Several applications are presented which demonstrate the utility and accuracy of finite element solutions in automotive engineering problems and highlight the scalability of the software.