Ansys and Nvidia help accelerate Volvo Cars EX90 aero simulations

At Nvidia’s GTC today, Ansys announced that its Fluent computational fluid dynamics simulation software leveraging just eight Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to accelerate solver speed by 2.5 times versus the same simulation run on 2016 CPU cores and cost-equivalent hardware to improve Volvo’s EX90 aerodynamic performance.
Robust simulations are critical for reducing aerodynamic drag, a significant factor influencing EV (electric vehicle) range, especially on the highway. However, high-fidelity CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulations can be time-consuming, compute-intensive, costly, and allow little opportunity for optimization.
Pittsburgh-based Ansys today announced at Nvidia’s GTC conference a significant breakthrough in aerodynamics simulations in collaboration with Volvo Cars and Nvidia, the companies reduced total simulation run time from 24 to 6.5 hours. Volvo Cars and Ansys scaled Fluent to eight Nvidia Blackwell GPUs (graphics processing units), enabling an optimized end-to-end workflow for which meshing only took 1 hour and the solver took 5.5 hours.
“Using Ansys simulation has the potential to help our teams obtain favorable designs and carry out virtual testing in much less time than traditional approaches allow,” said Torbjörn Virdung, Technical Leader for CFD at Volvo Cars. “To make our products more efficient, we must first take stock of the tools and solutions we’re using to get there.
Click on the link below to read the full post online.