What do Red Bull Racing and Dyson have in common?

Although he competed in four winter Olympics Bromley’s best performance landed him fifth place in the men’s skeleton at Turin in 2006. However on another level he accomplished so much more, as he did not originally set out to be a skeleton athlete. After finishing his degree in Mechanical Design, Materials and Manufacture, and his PhD in materials engineering both from the University of Nottingham, he somehow found himself in the world of winter sports.

As an aerospace engineer Bromley was interested in using technology and software to help improve on the dynamics of skeleton athletes, and on the sled to make them as efficient as possible. However a lot of the high end athletes were busy and not as easy to get hold as he first imagined, Bromley therefore ended up being the crash test dummy for some of the trials himself. Resulting in Bromley being the British number one for 18 years!

The impact of aerodynamic drag on success in skeleton and bobsleigh
Medal winning performance in the adrenaline fuelled winter sport of skeleton and bobsleigh is often defined by just a hundredth of a second over one mile of ice, and therefore the aerodynamic drag is a key factor that affects the performance.

Bromley Technologies uses Ansys CFD technology (Computational Fluid Dynamics) which plays a critical role in the continual innovation process of the athlete and sled system. CFD technology has been used in skeleton for over 100 years. It allows you to focus on performance strategy, by having a plan and path to the track, Bromley said: “If you don’t know where you are going you will never get there.”

Athlete scanning is used to achieve precision in terms of the posture of the head, and even down to muscle tension, and with the Ansys fluent CFD technology Bromley said you can get amazing results. “It is not just about the quantitative analysis it also helps lead you to the design and innovation of the athlete, with this technology you can work out whether it is best to gain a few kilograms – and even whereabouts on your body!”

Bromley learnt that the hard way, whilst using CFD technology he found that gaining 10kg on his glutes and hamstrings would actually benefit.

Red Bull Racing
Zoe Chilton, Head of Technical Partnerships at Red Bull Racing was there to explain the role Ansys plays at the company, which is to help find the best technologies and innovate them for the car to go faster.

At Red Bull Racing there is over 750 staff working on two cars with two drivers, so there is no hierarchy of A and B car, the aim is for both of them to do well. Every year there is something new to deal with regarding regulations so there are constant changes, which includes a huge amount of development. Essentially the company is working for two customers but with one product that is bespoke to several locations.

“The challenge is to understand the characteristics of all the circuits,” Chilton explained, and for this it demands huge amounts of data on every location and the demanding tracks.

With constant designing and developing of new parts for the car, the software and solutions that are used need to be of a certain level. Red Bull Racing need to be able to manipulate other parts so they are bespoke for certain tracks.

Chilton explained the process: “Design – Refine – Race – Repeat.”

Everything that is designed needs to be slightly better than before, so the staff are constantly learning. As there is the need for continuous design and interaction, CFD technology from Ansys provided the company with simulation systems to portray what the cars will experience when going through wind tunnels. The CFD technology also allows driver simulation within a full size car, so when the main challenge is finding the midway balance between the best car in terms of the engineering and in terms of the drive it is a great solution.

Chilton said: “The way you design through simulation is so much more advanced and can provide you with a perfect car in terms of the way it has been engineered, but the driver may not like the way it feels, so you need to find that middle point because often it can be very different.”

She continued: “It is not just performance that is key but reassurance is essential from an analysis point of view. There is only a short time period that you have to make sure things are right which means there is only a small and short margin for error.”

Back in 2008 Red Bull Racing started working with Ansys and started using Ansys T Grid for meshing and Ansys Fluent for solver elements of the current CFD process. The capability benchmarked every two to three years ensures best in class for Red Bull Racing, and means it can have a direct relationship with developers and its support team. Finally working with Ansys means Red Bull Racing has significant participation in Beta testing.

By using this software from Ansys it allowed Red Bull Racing to reach its five year goal in just three years, which again led to the training improving from six months down to just six weeks, and even more impressively, simulation was reduced down to just a few hours. Chilton concluded: “It let the engineers focus on the car instead of the IT.”

With Ansys’ next-generation pervasive engineering simulation technology it allows companies from a variety of sectors with a range of end-goals to simulate levels that have not been reached before. In 2018 Ansys are releasing their latest version which will feature a lot more updates and also see Ansys investing heavily in physical model fidelity with ROM (reduced order modules). The version 19.1 will provide next-generation pervasive engineering simulation and will provide virtual visibility for the navigation of self-driving cars, one of the biggest up and coming technologies.