Polestar Racing uses Mode Frontier to study the interrelationships of weight, aerodynamics and braking.
Polestar Racing, the official Volvo racing team, leveraged its use of advanced simulation technology to claim first prize in the 2012 Touring Car Team Association (TTA) championship in Sweden. Now the Polestar team is getting ready for the 2013 season, again using Mode Frontier engineering simulation software from Esteco to determine the car configuration which offers the best performance for different circuits and operating conditions. In 2012 Polestar used the Mode Frontier optimization platform to achieve improvements in weight, aerodynamics and brake distribution, leading to a lap time reduction ranging from 0.19 to 0.50 seconds.
Engineers for the Volvo team now call their optimization work the ‘Polestar Performance’ concept. The software is leveraged both as a tool for driving the aerodynamics, multi-body and structural analysis process, and to improve the real lap time simulation. Polestar started using the software in 2012 when new rules in the Racing Elite League run by TTA left little room for engineering design changes. Mode Frontier helped the team taking up the challenge by identifying the best combination of the front-to-rear weight, aerodynamics and brake distribution in less time.
With the new rules limiting track testing to three days, design simulation acquired an even greater importance. “Considering the limited amount of time we have had for testing in this championship, this kind of interrelated parameters study would not have been possible without the capability of modeFRONTIER to extend the simulation analysis,” says Per Blomberg, Polestar’s manager of chassis development. By integrating various CAE tools with Polestar, in only a few hours of simulation time Mode Frontier piloted the evaluation of parameter combinations that might have never been tested, leading to enhanced configurations.
Founded in 1999, Esteco provides advanced CAE software to more than 250 international clients including BMW, Daimler, Ferrari, Fiat, Ford, Honda, Mazda, and Toyota. The company says 2011 revenue was more than 4 million euros.
