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Automotive Industry

Software improves race engine development

Automotive Design & Production, June, 2007

Developing race engines for NASCAR competition can be time consuming and expensive, but through the use of digital shape sampling and processing (DSSP) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools, Richard Childress Racing (www.rcrracing.com) has devised a way to build engines through a more efficient and exacting process. Building on the process of using DSSP to model cylinder ports, Childress is improving data capture and accuracy by combining the use of a touch probe system from Renishaw (www.renishaw.com), a SP600 system, and a laser scanner. The probe captures the precise throat shapes from the deep, narrow passages within the cylinder head, while the scanner captures all other data in the form of point clouds. Because it takes several hundred laser scans to capture the data for a complete cylinder head, Childress uses Geomagic Studio software (www.geomagic.com), where the data is registered automatically, further reducing surface reconstruction time, while improving accuracy through the manufacturing process. The Geomagic software provides a patented feature that "wraps" point cloud data to automatically generate a polygon surface, which can then be converted to non uniform rational basis surfaces via the click of a mouse. Childress creates templates in Geomagic Studio for surface models of ports and chambers, enabling engineers to mix and match port shapes from past designs and tailor them to the specifications for the current port.

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Automotive Industry

Software improves race engine development

Automotive Design & Production, June, 2007

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