CFD Provocateur

Many magazine editors waste their monthly column space, by summarizing the content in that issue. What’s the point of that? Rarely are they adding anything that you won’t soon read yourself. Personally, I feel this space is better served either to bring you a short piece of history that you otherwise might not have been aware of, or to get you thinking about a topic relevant to our collective interests…in short, I occasionally should serve as a provocateur. So excuse me for a second while I pull the pin from this hand-grenade and stir the pot a little!

I was fascinated by Mike Jiggle’s interview, in last month’s Roadcar, with KW Motorsport founder Kieron Salter. Salter and his company are using cutting-edge technology to recreate parts that have long transcended into the realm of “unobtanium.” Salter went on to point out that the technological tools and materials are now available to better engineer many of these parts to be safer. In particular, Salter pointed out CFD (computational fluid dynamics), which can enable engineers to test such things as aerodynamics virtually, in a computer simulation rather than on-track. As Salter noted, “…there’s no need of using a driver as a guinea pig or crash-test dummy to prove something by physically driving a car.” Which raises, for me, an interesting philosophical question, “How far can we, or should we, go to better engineer a historic racecar?”