Powered by HPC, Bloodhound Supercar goes for 1000 MPH

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Dr Ben Evans, Bloodhound SSC’s Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Engineer.

HPC Wales is contributing to the dream of building the world’s car that can break the 1000 mph barrier. Launched in 2007 with the intention of building a rocket-powered car capable of attaining supersonic speeds, the Bloodhound project also aims to inspire young people to take up careers in science and engineering making all of its research and design material available to teachers, students and visitors.

Using high performance computers is the only way, really, you can do realistic flow simulations for a vehicle as complex as this,” said Dr Ben Evans, Bloodhound SSC’s Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Engineer. There are lots of things we need to understand about the aerodynamics of the vehicle to make sure that it’s safe; we need to understand where the loads are distributed across the vehicle, we need to understand if we’ve got the drag (the resistive force of the air that will be pushing on the car) as low as it can be so that our engines can propel us to the speeds we are going for; and to do the modelling to understand all of that requires some incredibly complex calculations to process massive amounts of data. HPC Wales has been invaluable to us, simply because of the size of the machine and the amount of resource that we’ve got access to. It allows us to run simulations much quicker than we’ve ever been able to do before, which has allowed us to run more simulations than we’ve ever been able to do before. This has allowed us to understand this vehicle better than really we’d ever hoped to be able to do at this stage of the project.

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