With almost every aspect of motorsport engineering a potential means of advantage on the circuit, vehicles from cars to motorbikes must exhibit ultra-high standards of reliability as well as performance if they are to contribute to race success.
Increasingly, advanced technologies such as CAD and augmented reality are influencing manufacturing in all industries and transforming a futuristic idea into today’s real-world applications. In motorsport, these technologies mean that manufacturers and suppliers can join the race to ensure that their products are the best and most competitive.
Based in Austria, KTM is a maker of high-end motorsport vehicles, focusing on motorcycles, underscoring its “ready to race” philosophy. The firm has partnered with software company PTC to use its Creo software in a bid to avoid many of the growing pains that product developers can encounter. According to PTC, the Creo product development software allows companies to take their products from concept to digital prototype with efficiency and accuracy.
Unlike many other manufacturers, KTM engineers everything in-house. That includes the engine, chassis and wheels. “This kind of control helps the company optimise every part of the bike, maximising performance,” explains Paul Haimes, vice-president of business development at PTC. “Aided by Creo’s flexible modelling approach, KTM and other companies are able to take existing designs and make modifications to significantly improve performance.
“Companies using Creo can quickly take any design and easily modify it. We can design, simulate, optimise and modify every aspect of the complete bike in PTC Creo, and this can all be done in just a few hours, compared with the weeks and months it took previously.”
Another company working with PTC on advanced engineering solutions is Carlin of Farnham, Surrey. This is a motor racing team which competes in seven championships: GP2 Series, GP3 Series, FIA European Formula 3 Championship, MSA Formula, Formula Renault 3.5 Series, Indy Lights and FIA Formula E.
Working with PTC Creo, Carlin has been able to use the software to amplify the success of the next generation of its racing vehicles. Carlin buys its cars from Italian manufacturer Dellara and, to develop them and increase competitiveness, the company uses Creo to calculate mass reduction of the vehicles.
The biggest benefit Carlin receives from Creo is for reverse engineering, says technical director David Brown. Reverse engineering is a process by which the design of a product is analysed or re-created using a physical part or mock-up as a starting point. This becomes truly valuable when trying to extract the design intent from a handmade model, from discontinued parts or from an old design that was made without a 3D model reference.
“Carlin uses reverse engineering to take apart the car to see how it works in order to enhance it,” explains Brown. “The practice, taken from older industries, is now frequently used on computer hardware and software, and has been adopted by us in the adaption of Dellara cars which we use in our races to ensure they are fit for the race and as lightweight as possible.
Shaping up
“When we receive the car from Dellara, we have no CAD data for it, so the way of obtaining that particularly for bodywork shape is via reverse engineering,” says Brown. “The first process when we receive a new car from the manufacturer is to perform a digital scan on it and we use an outside company who come in and do that. The process takes one to two days depending on how much detail we want and generally it’s the surfaces of the car that are touched by the air flow.”
The critical steps in reverse engineering are acquiring, accurately and efficiently, the shapes of the car body which are mostly freeform and extracting the information from the resulting scan to recreate the model as it’s intended to be: a perfect CAD file that would be rid of the imperfections of the initial body, explains Brown.
“We don’t scan the engine or pull apart components, it’s just the aerodynamic surfaces that get scanned,” says Brown. “Then using that, we are able to use PTC’s reverse engineering programs to create surfaces which use the scan data like a framework. Surfaces get dropped onto this and there’s various things we can use within the program to see how accurate these surfaces are when they’re scanned.”
PTC has also started working on augmented reality (AR), the technology that can place a computer-generated image in the real world. AR can be used to address service challenges for manufacturers in motorsport and other industries, allowing technicians to perform services faster, even with little or no experience of the vehicle, more accurately and at lower cost.
While Carlin hasn’t worked with PTC for AR developments to its cars yet, Haimes explains that it is a possible area for the future. And recently PTC has introduced its AR technology to KTM for an iPad service dashboard that lets field technicians perform faster diagnostics and deliver a more consistent service.
At a recent PTC event, a Creo-created motorcycle part was shown in its intended environment. The part was first taken from Creo and shown on an iPad. As the iPad was pointed towards a real motorcycle, the Creo part appeared in the proper place. “By overlaying the 3D CAD geometry on the physical bike, technicians can see exactly how to remove a panel and check a particular connection, streamlining the procedure,” says Haimes.
Faster servicing
KTM’s app recognises different serviceable elements on its bikes and then walks the technician through the necessary steps to fix them. “Ultimately, we believe all these business applications are starting with a tablet because that’s what’s possible, but they will all be in eyewear at some point – they’ll be on your head,” explains Haimes.
In the future, it’s a given that advanced engineering technologies such as CAD and AR will increasingly be used in the manufacture and design of motorsport vehicles. PTC aims to advance its position in engineering technologies to aid the development process for other companies. “As these technologies advance and improve, the process of building a vehicle will become far simpler, quicker and cheaper,” says Haimes.
Augmented reality market set to explode
As augmented reality develops, it is becoming increasingly used in multiple industries. In fact, a report from Juniper Research shows that the use of AR apps in enterprises will grow to be worth $2.4 billion in 2019, up from $247 million in 2014 – a tenfold increase over five years. The enterprise AR market is primed by the growing use of AR in the consumer segment, creating a push-pull revolution that will affect both markets.
Last year, PTC, which owns ThingWorx, acquired Vuforia from Qualcomm Connected Experiences, a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated. Vuforia is said to be the industry’s most advanced and widely adopted AR technology platform and its mobile vision platform enables apps to see and connect the physical world with the digital world. PTC expects its use to increase. The company has recently partnered with not only KTM, but data centre power management equipment company Schneider Electric and Sysmex, which makes clinical testing systems for healthcare facilities, for its AR developments.