CAD and CFD history

[pnagy]

Does anyone know when CAD was first used to design a car and what was the last car to be designed by hand? Also when was the first time CFD was used?




Thanks

[MrT]

From Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAD

"First commercial applications of CAD were in large companies in the automotive and aerospace industries, as well as in electronics. Only large corporations could afford the computers capable of performing the calculations. Notable company projects were at GM (Dr. Patrick J.Hanratty) with DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computer) 1964; Lockheed projects; Bell GRAPHIC 1 and at Renault (Bezier) – UNISURF 1971 car body design and tooling."

People are still designing full single seater race cars without CAD now, see most ametuers!

[syguy]

If you are interested in the first commercial CFD package, then it was PHOENICS from CHAM released in 1981.

If you want more details on the origins of commercial CFD then try: http://www.symscape.com/blog/origins-of ... d-industry

Now if you wanted to know when was the first time commercial CFD was applied to an F1 car then there's a chance it was around 1993 when Benetton and Fluent Europe started collaborating. An article describing the use of Fluent on the Benetton F1 car appeared in Racecar Engineering by Saif-Deen Akanni in 1995. An article by the same author and sharing similar images appeared on AutoSpeed in 2001: http://www.autospeed.com/cms/A_109131/article.html