Camaro Underbody Design

The goal for this project is to increase the downforce of a 1997 Camaro SS by large amounts using a full underbody tray to take advantage of ground effects to the utmost extent. The first step was to take the car to a wind tunnel to get a baseline of where the lift and drag coefficients are currently with an unmodified body. These measurements will be used for comparison with the CFD data to ensure accurate results. The next step was to get the car digitalized. This was done with a White Light scanner courtesy of Craig Derian at Stackpole Engineering in Charlotte, NC. When the data was received the prototype of the underbody was attached to the car's surface using Solidworks and then was exported to Ansa to preprocess the surface mesh. Once the surface mesh was acceptable the mesh was exported as a Nastran file to be used in StarCCM+. In StarCCM+ the Camaro model was setup with a both a rolling road and a stationary ground to compare the boundary layer effects. After the simulations were run, the data was then exported to EnSight. While in EnSight the client-server function was used to create images. The benefits of the client-server feature was that the post processing on a very large CAD file could be done on a small ram computer, with the large CAD file stored and processed on a high RAM machine.

Contributors: George Fusner, Aaron Rinehimer, Dr. Mesbah Uddin