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A piece of coursework undertaken at the University of Southampton
The Brief
The Brief
The task was to design a single- or multi-element race-car wing with endplates in Solidworks, that is optimised to complete a particular street circuit in minimum time. 2D optimisation of the aerofoil's lift & drag coefficients was to be carried out against a 'black-box' circuit lap simulation function in Python, then a wing should be designed to achieve these specified parameters, further refined with 2D & 3D fluid simulation.
Initial design sketching:
Initial design sketching:
Parametric Design Study
Parametric Design Study
I used Solidworks’ built-in Parametric Study tool to generate 840 design points by varying angle-of-attack, maximum camber, and foil thickness then conducting flow simulation to obtain lift and drag for each wing. Plotly was used in Python to create 3D graphs to visualise this data. A clear Pareto frontier is visible upper-left of the first image. Since this Pareto frontier consists exclusively of low-camber aerofoils, I decided to use only one element (in contrast to initial design ideas that had multiple elements), because additional elements increase the overall effective camber of the wing.
Parameter Refinement
Parameter Refinement
To further refine the wing, I then manually varied some of the parameters and evaluated these with fluid simulation, to calculate lift & drag values. Wing configurations & results are shown in the table. Time values were obtained from the 'black box' circuit simulation (objective) function.
Aerofoil-endplate relative vertical position optimisation. Numbered from left to right
Final Wing Design
Final Wing Design
The final wing design. Produces 55.85N of lift and 8.48N drag
Engineering Drawing to BS8888
Engineering Drawing to BS8888
This assignment was graded 1st class.
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