Penske races to get car design right first time

An Ansys product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Dec 5, 2003

The design team at Team Penske uses Pro/Engineer as its primary design program running on HP C3700 hardware with Ansys FEA for testing design changes.

In early 2002 Team Penske, which has 115 Indy car wins under its belt and a record 12 Indianapolis 500 wins, making it the most successful team in this form of racing, embarked on an exciting new challenge when it entered the Indy Racing League (IRL) on a full-time basis.

This meant competing with different equipment on 15 different tracks.

Moving to the IRL presented a challenge, not just to the team on the track, but also to Penske's design team in Poole, Dorset, the company's traditional home base.

"The IRL is a technology restricted formula", says Design Engineer Chris Kirk.

"We have to work within very body design tight criteria and are limited in what we can change.

Competing cars have to use chassis from one of three manufacturers for example, and have to use the same gearbox, so major alterations are impossible".

"An added complication is the time factor.

There is a only a five month window between seasons which run from early March to September and the car must arrive at the first race tested and ready to win".

The design team uses Pro/Engineer as its primary design program running on HP C3700 hardware with Ansys finite element analysis (FEA) for testing design changes.

The Ansys FEA tool significantly shortens time to market by allowing engineers to use basic analysis capabilities during the design phase of product or part development.

The program provides designers with access to the same underlying analysis techniques that will be deployed later for detailed product certification, enabling them to make early, intelligent decisions about design, materials, and manufacturing.

"Over a week we built an Ansys model using solid and shell elements and the testing highlighted an area of the upright that was over flexing.

We were able to redesign the upright which, when it was retested was 25% stiffer for the same weight.

This dramatically improves the feed back that the driver gets from the steering wheel and provides the information to help him drive more effectively".

Penske also uses Ansys for composite analysis.

A considerable problem from a composite FEA point of view is the increased amount of data involved, due to the ply lay-ups, versus normal homogeneous material models.

Ansys provides the user with a number of easy to use tools for firstly checking the validity of the composite material modelling used, and secondly helping the user to evaluate the results through the composite lay-up that are of importance.

Nonlinear material behaviour and material failure models can also be used to evaluate problems in the composite design.

Kirk continues: "The way we lay-up composites can be a powerful way of effecting performance and we find that Ansys handles them all in a very user friendly way and, using Iges, we can transfer the data between Ansys and Pro/Engineer faultlessly".

Under IRL rules, constructors use the same chassis for three years so at the end of the 2005 season Penske will have to start all over again with a new wind tunnel model and testing program.

Still, if it maintains Roger Penske's philosophy that "effort equals results" its first IRL championship cannot be far away.