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. In this case, the capability of Ansys Fluent can allow us not only to perform extremely high-fidelity analyses, but the added Nvidia infrastructure supercharges the computation, so we can consider a greater number of design possibilities and reach an optimal car design faster.”

This accelerated process will help Volvo Cars meet critical emissions, range, and efficiency standards such as Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure requirements. The collaboration is said to not only facilitate more optimization studies for BEVs (battery electric vehicles) like the latest Volvo EX90 but also could prove to be a benchmark for other industries—including aerospace, motorsports, and consumer electronics—that require precise fluid-flow simulation.

“This breakthrough underscores how GPU-accelerated simulation can drive innovation and get products to market faster,” said Shane Emswiler, Senior Vice President of Products at Ansys. “The combination of high-fidelity modeling and extreme solver speed empowers customers to run more simulations and maximize the results to develop more performant products.”

Compared to solving the same simulation on cost-equivalent hardware using 2016 CPU cores, this equates to a 2.5 times speed increase in solve time. The technology combination can allow Volvo Cars to run multiple CFD simulations per day, evaluating a range of design variants to quickly enable a step change in design optimization.

“The efforts of Ansys and Volvo Cars showcase the exceptional performance and scalability of our latest Blackwell infrastructure offerings and its applicability to engineering simulation,” said Tim Costa, Senior Director of CAE, EDA, and Quantum at Nvidia. “Together with software partners like Ansys, we are paving the way for the future of computer-aided engineering and scaling to unprecedented heights, empowering our customers to solve their most complex challenges.”

The new collaboration follows a significant milestone Ansys announced at Supercomputing24 in Atlanta, GA, in November involving the largest Fluent CFD simulation ever run on Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper superchips. The technology collaboration accelerated simulation by 110 times, reducing the overall run time from four weeks to six hours. By harnessing the power of GPUs, Ansys solutions can deliver pervasive insights in a fraction of the time and maintain high predictive accuracy on even the biggest models using fewer computational resources.

Using advanced computing capability at the University of Texas at Austin‘s Texas Advanced Computing Center, Ansys collaborated with Nvidia to run a 2.4-billion-cell automotive external aerodynamics simulation, enabling two separate yet critical outcomes. First, Ansys software solved the CFD simulation significantly faster while maintaining the same predictive accuracy. Second, designers can add more parameters to refine the accuracy without having to compromise on overall simulation speed.

Ansys was the first to adopt an Omniverse Blueprint, a reference workflow of Nvidia acceleration libraries, artificial intelligence frameworks, and technologies, that enables real-time, interactive physics visualization in Ansys applications.