Schmidt,
You see I know very little about CFD, I was hoping you could explain how it is a cost effective tool to improve a head port to the average guy like me.
I also noted that, GM with all the mega bucks specific softwares they must have, still need a wind tunnel to evaluate a car body. In my limited mind, the air/fuel flow behavior into the port is much more complex that the air flow through a car body.
Or the wind tunnel may be used to calibrate the CFD programs?
Please gentleman, lets keep the "rev limiter" just at 6000...this topic can be real produtive
Most of the software at GM can be had by anyone, what they use ctually has some of the capabilties of the original software turned off so that less expereinced people can work on the models that more experienced people make. Most large companies operate this way. They do have some special things turned on for specific companies too. The days when you could write software that was better than commercial software are mostly history, you just can't compete with 40 years and hundreds of people of continuous development in a couple years work with one development team. Even NASA and JPL mostly use regular commercial software.
There is a lot of tradition in automaking even though they have virtual reality studios that make you feel like you are sitting in or touching a real car they still make clay models. People like what they are used to.
In regards to wind tunnels it is much more expensive/difficult/time consuming for vehicle exteriors than internal shapes like ports. The reason is that the wind tunnel has to be much larger than the car so to do that with CFD you have to solve for a huge volume around the car. Also, there are certain aesthetics about a smoke trail flowing over a car that will always be worth the price. I worked at Swift for a while, a wind tunnel is endlessly entertaining.
Of course huge amounts of time and money are saved on car exteriors with CFD. A lot of people go to school hopng to get a job using CFD for racing cars, but in reality most of the jobs are for things like designing air conditioning ducts.
I forget the name of it now but there is some racing jobs site that has something like 50 CFD guys looking to get into racing instead of AC ducts etc..