PROSTEP Sponsors the Formula Student DART Racing Team

This year PROSTEP AG is sponsoring the DART Racing Team at the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt) for the first time. The team is developing an electric racing car for the international Formula Student university design competition. The PLM consulting and software company is donating a computer to the students so that they can perform complex simulation tasks such as flow analyses and finite element calculations. The team says it intends to use the computer to not only optimize the properties of the electric vehicle's aerodynamic components but also maximize their strength and resistance to deformation.

The TU Darmstadt Racing Team e.V. (DART) is a nonprofit association that promotes science, research and education in vehicle construction. Approximately 60 students from the disciplines of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science and industrial engineering and other disciplines are involved. The team has a goal of designing, manufacturing, rolling out and validating two vehicles within one year and using them to successfully compete in the Electric and Driverless categories of the Formula Student competition. The next races are being held July 28 to August 1, 2019 at the Red Bull Race Track in Spielberg, Austria, and August 5-11, 2019 at the Hockenheimring race track in Germany.

This year, PROSTEP is sponsoring the team that is developing the current ny2019 electric vehicle. It is already the ninth all-electric vehicle that the students at the TU Darmstadt will be putting on the race track. One of the challenges that the ongoing further development poses is validating the aerodynamic properties of the vehicle as early as possible to achieve a high level of reliability, and do well in the races.

“As a student racing team, we have very limited access to wind tunnels and therefore rely heavily on CFD simulations to test our ideas for aerodynamic components,” says Marco Bonneschky, technical team leader Electric for the DART Racing Team. “Pre-processing, simulation and post-processing, however, require enormous computational power if we are to work efficiently in terms of time.”

E-mobility is an important future trend that not only requires new development tools and methods but also users with new skills, as Peter Pfalzgraf, head of the Products business unit at PROSTEP, says. “Providing support to the team participating in the Electric category of the Formula Student competition provides us with the perfect opportunity to establish contact with highly-skilled young scientists and to see how they master the challenges of e-mobility in a field as exciting as racing technology.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.