3D Digitizing a Salt Flat Racer for Speed Performance Adjustments during Speed Week
PROJECT:Â 3D scanning a salt flat racer to make performance improvements during speed week.
CHALLENGE:Â In order to improve performance, HELIMEC needed to get the car scanned onsite in Bonneville, Utah so that a computer model could be brought into CAD and put through CFD testing to decide on aerodynamic profile changes.
SOLUTION:Â With Scansite’s extensive experience, HELIMEC got the detailed information they needed and were able to perform high tolerance, computational fluid dynamics to determine if any changes could be made.
HELIMEC is a product design firm that advises its clients on designs and concepts, suggesting materials and processes that would be optimal for manufacturing, design, and performance. Recently, HELIMEC needed to help a race team, the Mariani Farms team, with its salt flat racer design and was tasked with determining if improvements could be made to its aerodynamic profile in order to enhance speed performance.
Driving Performance
The company needed to 3D digitize the Mariani salt flat racer to perform computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in order to analyze performance issues and streamline the car’s aerodynamic profile. HELIMEC chose Scansite to do the 3D scanning and CAD file creation.
“It was an easy choice for us since we’ve used Scansite for other projects and they’ve done phenomenal work,” said Andrew Greene, CEO of HELIMEC. “Scansite is highly accurate, to the point we don’t often even require all the data they collect. David (Scansite CTO) has the specific, extensive expertise that we need. Scansite is easy to communicate with and they always understand and deliver what we want.”
Unlike some companies, Scansite delivers mobile services; so the company went to Bonneville, Utah, to the site of the salt flats during speed week, to 3D scan the car. Once the car was digitized, Scansite precisely edited the data by using the surrounding topography as a guide to fill in any missing information to ensure the best 3D data possible.
Virtual Road Testing
Once this step was complete, Scansite then worked to create high tolerance STEP files, parametric file formats needed by the Computer Aided Design (CAD) program to run the CFD tests. HELIMEC ran these tests repeatedly with computerized modifications to the car, a virtual model if you will, to find out if the car’s performance would improve with the aerodynamic design changes.
“There is a lot more work involved in going from 3D scan data to a STEP or IGES file, which is what HELIMEC needed for this race car project,” said David Bassett, CTO at Scansite. “We use the best hardware and software available on the market. But getting the raw scan data to a parametric format needed by CAD takes extensive expertise, talent and experience, which is what we bring to our clients.”
“From the scan data and CAD file that Scansite provided, we created a computer model of the car, put it in a virtual wind tunnel and produced results information on drag, turbulence, and more. From there, we made changes to the computer model and ran the test again to see if there were positive performance changes,” said Greene. “We kept making changes until improvements were made and, if that were to happen, we’d have our blueprint for changes to the car. Or, we might determine that the existing car would not sustain alterations to improve the car’s aerodynamics enough to improve performance.”
As it turned out, the CFD results revealed that it would be best to start over with a new car. “We determined that not enough changes could be made to the existing car to improve its aerodynamic profile enough to compete at the level desired, so a new one was built,” said Greene. “Only Scansite’s meticulous work could give us the details we needed to run all of the tests in the time we needed to run them.”
HELIMEC appreciates the expertise and experience of the Scansite team and the precision of its 3D scanners. “You just know when you talk to Scansite why their technology is better, you know why you want to use them, and once you’ve used Scansite, you know you want to use them all the time,” said Greene. “With development programs like ours, if you use a vendor and it doesn’t work out, it’s not only wasted money but wasted time – those are both resources we don’t have in excess. Once you use a vendor and they get it right the first time, you don’t go anywhere else. And, finally, it doesn’t hurt that Scansite is a team of awfully nice people.”
“Scansite is highly accurate, to the point we don’t even need all of the data they collect (would like to not highlight this as I’m always telling people more data is better!! More data is better because it gives us options). David (Scansite CTO) has the specific, extensive expertise that we need.”
-- Andrew Greene, CEO, HELIMEC
Maybe use this instead:“Only Scansite’s meticulous work could give us the details we needed to run all of the tests in the time we needed to run them.”
“You just know when you talk to Scansite why their technology is better, you know why you want to use them, and once you’ve used them, you know you want to use them all the time.”
-- Andrew Greene, CEO, HELIMEC
