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As described in an Autoweek article, CFD enabled engineers to spend less time working with clay models in the wind tunnel and more time improving the design.
For example, as Mike Anderson, executive director of virtual design, development, and validation, points out, clay models don’t have all of the features you’d expect from a production-ready vehicle. Important features like panel gaps simply can’t exist. However, with some savvy programming of a digitized car model, you can now see how your panel gaps affect the air swarming around your car at speed.
Simulated airflow over the Cadillac Lyriq vented spoiler.
While this sounds like good news for the team that helped get the Lyriq out of the engineering team’s door nine months early, it’s probably not going to become uncommon. Anderson explains that the VDDV team works closely with the styling studio and can help show how changes will affect a vehicle's performance almost immediately, opposed to the week-long lead time that a similar task used to take.
All in, this could point at the Cadillac Lyriq as becoming a touchpoint in the automotive world. Not because of its electric powertrain, but because of the ways that the team shrunk its development time using advanced tools.
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