Accurate and fast evaluation of drag and aerodynamic noise around vehicles is still today an open computational problem. Accurate drag evaluation is important and today’s commercial CFD codes predict values of drag that match reasonably well experimental results. Nonetheless, being able to predict (and optimise) drag when the design variables are the vehicle geometry is also crucial and decisive because it has a major impact in the overall design time. This is known to be extremely expensive in production cycles due to the large amount of configurations tested and the high cost of each simulation involved in the shape optimization process.

Reliable and fast modelling of aero-acoustics is in today’s frontier of knowledge and industry is in need of relevant contributions in this area. Aerodynamic noise requires capturing complex flow features with high-fidelity computational tools. This extra difficulty makes the complete aero-acoustics design cycle a major challenge for today’s engineers and scientists.

The aim of this project is to develop a methodology able to capture all the flow features that are required in aero-acoustic simulations. A technique capable of introducing the geometric design variables as extra parameters in the numerical simulation will be developed. The method will be applied to the numerical solution of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations.

PhD candidate: Luca Borchini (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Volkswagen, Swansea University)

Academic supervisors: Prof. A. Huerta, Dr. M. Giacomini (UPC), Dr. R. Sevilla (Swansea University)

Industrial supervisor: Dr.rer.nat. C. Othmer (Volkswagen)