Comparison between Solidworks and Ansys CFX Flow Simulation on Aerodynamic Studies

Abstract

Nowadays, with increase in competition in automobile sector, the Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulation has become one of important tool in the process of vehicle manufacturing. It is because the CFD simulation able to shorten the lead time in the research and development process. The idea of this project is to analyse the aerodynamic behaviour of a local sedan car, Perodua Bezza by using different software which are SolidWorks Flow Simulation and ANSYS CFX. Both of the software used the same boundary condition and setup except for the type of flow used in the simulation in order to obtain a fair result. The velocity inlet used for this project is 30.56 m/s and the turbulence model selected is standard k-ε. The coefficient of drag for the model obtained for SolidWorks 2018 and ANSYS CFX is 0.396 and 0.413 respectively. The percentage different of the drag coefficient between both software is about 4%, and this probably due to different type of flow used in this simulation. Compared to 0.286 drag coefficient value provided by the manufacturer, the percentage different between the SolidWorks 2018 and ANSYS CFX with the manufacturer data is about 38% and 44% respectively. The different is might be due to simplified version of the car model, the parameters set is different with the manufacturer settings and also the type of flow used in the simulation. Overall, both software can be used for aerodynamic behaviours study but ANSYS CFX 18.2 is better choice because it provides multiple parameters settings which can be used to study more complex flow simulation