Team Zephyros, a student team from Raha International School Gardens Campus, participated in the 2023–2024 UAE F1 in Schools National Finals. F1 in Schools is an international STEM competition where students aged 11 to 19 work in teams of three to six to design and manufacture a miniature Formula One car using CAD/CAM tools, with the car powered by a CO₂ canister. In the 2023–2024 season, Team Zephyros emerged as the UAE National Champions, securing first place overall and receiving the prestigious ‘Best Engineering‘ award. They also achieved third place in the race time category, showcasing both technical excellence and competitive performance.
Design Challenges
The team aimed to implement numerous geometry optimizations to reduce drag but initially faced challenges in identifying the most aerodynamically effective solutions. To address this, they utilized SimScale’s CFD tools to simulate changes in drag force resulting from modifications to various parts of their car. Their CAD models were created in Onshape, and thanks to SimScale’s direct integration with Onshape, the team was able to import their car bodies seamlessly—greatly improving workflow efficiency compared to other CAE software.
In addition to CFD, the team also leveraged SimScale’s FEA suite to optimize components such as the wheels and the wing support structure, ensuring these parts were both lightweight and structurally sound.
The integration of several CAE tools within a single streamlined user interface makes SimScale, compared to other options, very easy and convenient to use.
– Team Zephyros
How SimScale Simulations Led to Success
To set up their CFD simulations, the team imported their car geometry from Onshape into SimScale. They created an external flow volume, applied boundary conditions including a pressure outlet and moving wall to simulate ground and wheel motion, and selected an incompressible steady-state analysis using the k-omega SST turbulence model. A region refinement was added around the car to improve mesh resolution, and force/moment controls were used to track aerodynamic performance.
For FEA simulations, the team imported their wheel geometry, applied appropriate boundary conditions (a 60N vertical load and fixed support), and increased mesh quality to improve accuracy. These simulations were key to optimizing weight and structural integrity.
One major challenge was fine-tuning the car’s body design for aerodynamic efficiency. After researching natural streamlined shapes, the team experimented with a concave front-end profile inspired by penguins, which research showed had a lower drag coefficient than traditional teardrop shapes. Simulations confirmed their hypothesis: the concave body produced less drag (0.354N vs. 0.362N), leading the team to adopt this optimized design. The pressure visualization tools in SimScale were especially helpful in guiding this decision
Using just a few core hours, the team achieved an excellent CFD convergence with acceptable range of residual values showing an improvement over the method used in the previous season despite lower computational cost. Over the course of the project, they ran 165 simulations across both CFD and FEA. The standard meshing algorithm with a fineness level of 5 proved most effective, with region refinements providing sufficient accuracy.
SimScale proved to be an invaluable tool throughout our development process, offering both efficiency and ease of use. We’re excited to continue this partnership as we head into the World Finals.
– Team Zephyros
