[KVRC] Khamsin Virtual Racecar Challenge 2016

[linda0012]

I think that the best option would be to use an evolved release of the 2015 rulebook, so it would be possible to include the improvements from the 2015 experience.

I have used that but could not get satisfaction from it. Don't know why?

[julien.decharentenay]

Hello. I have catched up with the thread and am sorry for not keeping up-to-date. Chris did a great job with updating the 2015 regulations and checking all the submissions. There are a couple of aspects that I would like to mention:

1) Marketing/Participants: we are indeed short staffed (if you can even call Chris and I staff). Marketing is not my strong point... I will try to get things started for 2016 with trying to approach engineering students to increase participation and CAD related companies for partnering [I would rather stay away from CFD software provider as they are likely to be cool about using it for the simulation, but not keen on giving it away].

2) Leagues: At this stage, the number of participants is too small to spread around 2 leagues [in my opinion]. Would having 2 leagues increase the number of participants? How would we ensure that participants go in the appropriate league?

3) CFD: I am focusing on compiling a version of openFoam for Windows as I don't like having to register to download openFoam. Also it could be a good way to raise the KVRC profile. But, keep in mind that there will be some discrepancy between windows vs linux. Hopefully these will get smaller, but they are likely to still be present.

4) Pressure: I am modifying OCCFD to calculate surface integral of pressure at the intake and exhausts and will aim to run the last KVRC 2015 round with it. i think that from a regs perspective it would help as there will no longer be a lot of requirement for free space forward of the intake - Chris can you confirm - but there are some technical challenges to take into account. Does it work? What would be the baseline? What is the rate of change? Can it be implemented in Virtual Stopwatch? Is it not too complicated for participants?

It is great to see that people are looking at the thread even if they are not taking part in the challenge. There is a lot of interesting points being made and it is true that the CAD aspect is a real challenge in itself.

[CAEdevice]

Point 1: I'm in contact with an Italian online magazine, dedicated to real motorsport races, what about trying to write something about the KVRC? I can publish an article as a rest on my wordpress blog in the next weeks. At the moment my advice is to keep the official website up to date (twitter announcements, results table, ...).

Partecipants: students are welcome (an excellent example is Variante, who is seriously near to win the challange), but also consider the possibility to involve small companies or consultant providing CAE services (take me or Mantium as example).

Aerospace and mechanical engineering departements could be interested too (maybe the development of a kvrc car should be a good topic for a third year thesis at PoliMi, Variante?).

Finally: sponsorship. Do you think that one of small or great companies working on or around OpenFoam could be interested? I mean ESI group or third party software houses.

It is not exactly my job, but I can try to work in this direction (it would be a way to help with renouncing to compete).

[LVDH]

I showed quite some stuff during the XFlow User Conference in Madrid using my car.
So I encouraged the audience to have a look at the challenge.
Lets see if it gets us some new participants.

[UlleGulle]

I've worked with communication for almost eight years.

The basis of every successfull business relationship is mutual benefit. In order to get some serious sponsorship we need to create a value for intended sponsors.

I'd go about it by emailing professors and student organisations at automotive educations informing about the Khamsin virtual championship and your thoughts on how to implement your work on their education. In a competative enviroment, the students will be able to hone their cad-skills and aerodynamic understanding within a fixed set of rules.

This would make sponsorship more benificial to different kinds of automotive companies, as the means to discover talent. However, this requires a critical mass of 15-20 teams.

Having such a large series would require quite some work to manage and surely some cultural changes. Therefore I'd propose some changes to the way the series is run.

1. Simplified legality check: Only top five cars are always checked for legality after the race. A car feuturing illegal parts is disqualified. A car finishing 6-10 can be tested for legality if protested by another team. Extra points are awarded for belonging to the top teams, eg First car gets 50p, 2nd: 40p 3rd: 30p 4th: 2p0 5th: 15p. and 6th: 5p, 7th: 4p 8th:3p 9th: 2 p 10th 1p.

2. Simpified design rules: What is and isn't realistic aerodynamic solutions is quite fuzzy. This only works in a great community like yours, not in a larger context. The rules therefore has to be clear, if a design is legal it is a working design. Rules should be based only on viseable designs. By publising Hi-res photos of participants cars, this enables other teams to do the legality check by protesting.

3. Conflict resolution: A fixed framework for clarifications, rule changes during the season and appeals.

4. A design template: The first submission of the winning car of the championship the previous year will be supplied to all patricipating teams. This will ensure technical advancement but being the first submission of the season it will still give him/her some head start.

I strongly urge you to shelf the idea of a two tier championship. The series is not big enough for that.

These proposed changes are quite radical and marketing will take time. I therefore suggest that you are patient, and use the next year to prepare for a bigger series in 2017.

[CAEdevice]

Very interesting points!

1. Simplified legality check: Only top five cars are always checked for legality after the race. A car feuturing illegal parts is disqualified. A car finishing 6-10 can be tested for legality if protested by another team. Extra points are awarded for belonging to the top teams, eg First car gets 50p, 2nd: 40p 3rd: 30p 4th: 2p0 5th: 15p. and 6th: 5p, 7th: 4p 8th:3p 9th: 2 p 10th 1p.

I would add a final double points race.
About the legality check; I agree, with the exception of the first race: Chris reports are very useful not only to show what is wrong, but also to understand the rules.

4. A design template: The first submission of the winning car of the championship the previous year will be supplied to all patricipating teams. This will ensure technical advancement but being the first submission of the season it will still give him/her some head start.

Wich version of the winning car? I think that it would be too much revealing... Consider that I release my car every year on GrabCAD, but it is not the winning one.
A good compromise would be a "basic" car provided by the organizers (similar to the model that Chris presented at the beginning of 2015 edition, but more complete) designed to be a good start point, but without revealing too much.

[UlleGulle]

Wich version of the winning car? I think that it would be too much revealing... Consider that I release my car every year on GrabCAD, but it is not the winning one.
A good compromise would be a "basic" car provided by the organizers (similar to the model that Chris presented at the beginning of 2015 edition, but more complete) designed to be a good start point, but without revealing too much.

Well, my thought was that if you win this season, you'd have to supply your competition with the car you submitted for the Nürburgring. There are some advantages.

Altough you, as a winning designer has the advantage of fully understanding you design and and being almost a season ahead of the newcomers, you can't just sit back and refine your design. Others will do that to, and try to reverse engineer your development. As a winner, you'd have to be innovative. A designer having problems with a specific part of a car eg. the floor, could also copy a quite efficient design. It would work as a leveller, bringing teams closer to each other. It would also ensure faster racing every year as the worst team will start where the best team started last year.

A competitor with limited amounts of time would also be able to just fine-tune some specific parts of the car and still field a competative car.

The most important reason though, is to take as much workload of the organizers as possible. Making a template car which is not as competative is just unreasonable imho.

[LVDH]

I like these ideas.
Sometimes I wondered if there should be something like a parts basar. After a race it is somehow determined that every participant has to make one of the parts of his car available on the KVRC homepage.
Parts like front / rear wing, main body, floor, cooling package. Then other participants can take the parts and assemble them to a new car.

And next time we should get rid of the non championship race. And although it would help me now, the double-points last race is (in my opinion) not a good idea.

[variante]

Well, my thought was that if you win this season, you'd have to supply your competition with the car you submitted...

I don't like that. The moment that i enjoy the most of the KVRC is the initial design of the car; i find it relaxing and exiting at the same time, a moment of pure creation where ideas become tangible objects, the moment where fantasy "takes the lead" and tries to bend the regulations to the limit to create a winning car. Transforming that moment in a phase where participats simply copy/paste others cars is not in the spirit of such moment...

I do think that the competition should be tight and that we should help new entries, but not to such extent.

Also, it's not fair to give away our know-how so easily: that know-how was earned after months or years of R&D, and i don't get why that R&D work shouldn't be done by everyone. I'd like to underline that, in order to actually understand how something works, the best way is to develope it yourself. Copying it would not put you on the same level of the guy who invented it...
This being said, i'm the first one to share the acquired knowledge.

What I think would be useful to everybody are aerodynamics "lessons" such as the ones you can see in Machin's tread. I would keep on doing what Chris has been doing as well, which is taking some key images (maybe not too detailed...) of the cars and sharing them with everybody.

I would add a final double points race.

I agree. While it doesn't make sense in F1 or any other real life race, it would make a lot of sense here.

By publising Hi-res photos of participants cars, this enables other teams to do the legality check by protesting.

It would be impossible, for example, to determine by eye if a diffuser is 10mm higher than the allowed height. 10mm, however, make quite a difference performance wise...
I think that regulation check should be done to everyone, just like today. To deal with greater participant volumes my solution would be deregulation.

I kinda agree with all the rest.

Aerospace and mechanical engineering departements could be interested too (maybe the development of a kvrc car should be a good topic for a third year thesis at PoliMi, Variante?).

That's a key point. I strongly believe that any engineer, especially those who are still studying, should be involved in a similar challenge. This is the only way to actually understand how a car should be designed. No matter what grades you've achieved at the university: you will be a Mr. Nobody if you're not able to design a decent engineering product. Participating in such championship would put you in comparison with actual competitors, allow you to understand what you're actually able to do and give you the opportunity to improve.

[julien.decharentenay]

Thanks a lot for the feedback. There are a lot of very interesting points being raised - and a lot of work to do... There is a challenging balance to achieve in regards to sharing the best practice from the winners while not divulging all the intelligence - although I think that the designing act would not work too well by just copy and paste. There is a lot of work to achieve balancing and adjusting the car design to the track. Also this year showed a lot of variation in the design, which was nice to see.

[cdsavage]

Hi guys, sorry about the recent lack of updates from my end. For the "class B" idea - I think this is worth doing as long as we dont split the competitors into separate classes. Instead we would still have everyone earning points towards the main championship, but a sub-championship for those who use a set of standard components without modification. I would suggest supplying bodywork forming the nose/cockpit/engine cover, fenders and sidepods, leaving the rest of the car free for development. For those with less time to spend on their designs, it greatly simplifies the rulebook while still leaving the significant regions open for development. Since the car would meet the full rulebook and points are already being scored towards the main championship, at any point a competitor in the subclass could choose to start modifying the standard parts and take themselves out of the sub-class.

[CAEdevice]

I like cdsavage proposal. What about providing a base car completed with everything is located between the front axle and rear axle and with the diffuser volume filled?It should have closed sidepods and cooling inlets/outlets positioned like TF car, to simplify the rule compliance.

[julien.decharentenay]

Hi. I made some progress on the pressure on intake and exhaust aspect. It will be reported in the next round of results and is extracted using ParaView. We will see what the results look like.

However I need some input on finding the relevant way to present it. At the moment, I am extracting the pressure integrated over the whole intake/exhaust area. It is reported for each individual intakes and exhausts (ie 4 values in total: 1 for the cooling intake, 1 for the cooling exhaust, 1 for the engine intake and 1 for the engine exhaust). The surface integrated pressure unit is Pa.m2 or N.

I am also reporting it normalised by 1/2*rho*v*v so that it is homogene to a m2 and should be independent from the velocity. On of the aspect of this approach is that it combined both pressure and surface area.

What do you think?

[CAEdevice]

I think that 2016 cars will be much more interesting to design, thanks to that new function!

[CAEdevice]

What about the front engined template? I've found a rendering on the web that reminds me something: