It's virtually possible..with a Digital Wind Tunnel
Over ten years of extensive development, validation, and input from experimentalists has made PowerFLOW Digital Wind Tunnel™ (DWT) a tried and true method for performing wind tunnel testing through computer simulation. This breakthrough technology, combined with today’s commodity computer hardware, allows Exa to offer a wind tunnel simulation solution that complements and expands the capabilities of physical wind tunnels. Worldwide automotive manufacturers agree, PowerFLOW DWT is a reliable method that significantly enhances today’s aerodynamic and aeroacoustic engineering design testing and analysis efforts.
With PowerFLOW DWT, aerodynamicists and engineers can take advantage of digital tools designed specifically to replicate enhanced tunnel tests such as oil flows, rolling roads, surface pressures, detailed flow visualizations and more. In addition, a PowerFLOW DWT test simultaneously collects data for each and every point within the tunnel – allowing engineers and stylists to gain critical insight into the aerodynamic flow interactions. Thanks to Exa, engineers can truly view, communicate, analyze and understand tunnel test results with their design teams as never before.
Exa's Digital Wind Tunnel : virtual reality, real data.
Image courtesy of R. Trenne.
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Proven Accuracy
Over the past ten years, Exa Corporation has earned an excellent reputation for achieving consistent, accurate fluid flow results – fully validated and used in production at top manufacturers worldwide. In addition, Exa’s patented DIGITAL PHYSICS® technology, a robust and proven approach for digitally simulating fluid flow, has made handling even the most complex wind tunnel tests (even those with time-varying conditions) easy to perform. PowerFLOW DWT combines state-of-the-art physics modeling and software development, resulting in the most accurate, scalable, and feature-driven digital wind tunnel technology available.
Digital Simulations Open Up a New Realm of Possibilities
A PowerFLOW wind tunnel simulation offers a series of benefits simply not achievable with a physical wind tunnel today, including:
- Identify drag and lift contribution by component or feature
- Digitally document all test setups and run time data for future reference
- Perform Rolling road/rotating tire simulations with yawed flow
- Obtain detailed test data simultaneously with every run such as surface pressures, oil flows, complete flow field data and aeroacoustics
- Run underhood flows and identify underbody pressure losses early in the design cycle
- Easily upgrade and expand capacity for faster turnaround
Cost Effective Performance
PowerFLOW offers significant added value to companies with and without existing wind tunnel capabilities:
- Physical wind tunnel users can identify optimal designs using PowerFLOW as their digital tunnel prior to physical testing, ensuring more cost effective use of tunnel time.
- Tunnel capacity limitations are no longer a problem. At competitive prices, employees can be up and running digital tunnel simulations within days – quickly expanding throughput, resulting in higher quality designs and shorter time to market.
- Proven, virtual aerodynamic analysis is now possible for companies that previously had no access to physical wind tunnels, allowing them to cost effectively compete with the world’s top engineering firms.
Money Saving Benefits
- Reduce physical prototypes
- Decrease the number of required experimental tests
- Engineers' time spent on results analysis instead of setup and data collection
- Gain confidence early in the design cycle that prototypes meet criteria
- Bring highly competitive, superior quality products to market
- Shorten time to market
- Avoid costs of building or upgrading a physical wind tunnel
- Gain unprecedented new insight into flow behavior
- Run simulations around the clock - not just when your engineers are working
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