IT team finds right formula to drive Renault's success

In today's world of Formula One grand prix racing, it would be nice to think that the drivers are the main factor in determining the race outcome - especially when Ferrari's Michael Schumacher appears to holds such an unassailable lead.

But over the past decade, IT has developed and grown into one of the most crucial aspects of the sport.

Behind the scenes, hundreds of people employ the latest technologies to design and build the supercharged engines and ultra-light vehicles that propel drivers to speeds of 360km/h - and allow them to decelerate by 160km/h in just one and half seconds.

Over the racing season, teams of designers, engineers, composite materials specialists and other experts at every manufacturer work day and night to make countless tweaks and changes to the cars to try and trim another tenth of a second off a lap time.

The pace of technological development in grand prix racing is such that the design of the vehicles constantly evolve, introducing new ideas and taking into account lessons learnt in the previous season.

According to the Renault F1 Team, IT was a crucial factor in propelling Renault from fourth place in 2003 to second place in the constructor's championship this year.

'A lot of the technology in our cars is based on technology from the aerospace industry. In fact our cars are closer to being an advanced jet fighter than a road vehicle,' said Luca Mazzocco, a spokesman at Renault's F1 production factory in Enstone, Oxfordshire.

IT is so integral to the cars that they can't start without a laptop attached to them.

Now, when the team departs for the next track - taking with them five engines, four chassis, 40 sets of wheels, 17,000 spare parts and five tonnes of equipment - they also take 30 laptops and servers from storage supplier Network Appliance with 2Tb of test and vehicle data.

On-site telemetry picks up real-time data from more than 200 sensors on the cars as they drive, with more detailed information downloaded at the end of the practice session or race, helping engineers analyse every aspect of the vehicle's performance.

'Ten years ago, we would collect a floppy disk of data for the whole race. Today we collect more than a DVD worth of data,' said Renault F1 Team's IT manager Graeme Hackland.

This data is uploaded across satellite links to the company's UK production factory and its engine factory in France, where a range of specialists analyse the information for clues on how they could improve performance.

It's in these factories that IT has really changed the nature of Renault F1's production.

At the start of the process, every part that makes up the car is designed on powerful Unix-based workstations running CAD/CAM applications, with designers generating up in 10,000 individual drawings over the season.

Unlike drawings from the past, these electronic images contain a wealth of data about the part and the materials they are constructed from.

'They are no longer just dimensional drawings, but they include a lot of data about the materials they are made of, which allows us to do things like virtual stress testing. We can see what pressures that part could sustain and where it would break,' said Mazzocco.

During a race, a Formula 1 car undergoes huge stresses - brake pads heat up to 1000 degrees Celsius, its 3-litre engine has to handle up to 18,000 RPM, while its pistons are subjected to 10,000Gs of pressure at full throttle.

To test how new parts will respond to these strains, new designs are put through a series of virtual tests, which analyses how they will react to various situations and how their design will perform aerodynamically.

Once a draft virtual model is established, drawings are sent to the aerodynamics team for testing.

Designs are 'printed' on state-of-the-art 3D printers, producing actual parts made from a hardened resin that can be fitted onto the scale model of the car used in Renault's wind tunnel (see below).

'We test at 50 per cent of the size of the actual car, using struts to hold the vehicle at any possible angle or height off the ground. This is all controlled by computers, with sensors on the car collecting data to show how different parts perform aerodynamically,' said Hackland.

'Five days of testing produces more than 5Gb of data, which is about the same as what we get from track testing.'

Elsewhere in the factory, the same designs are used by the production department to create car parts via a range of advanced manufacturing processes.

In the machine room, complex computer-controlled equipment cuts the moulds for the production of carbon fibre-based composite components, while other machines use electrically-charged copper wires to carve precise designs out of blocks of aluminium or titanium.

'Almost all of our fabrication is done by computer-controlled machines now, with only parts of the fabrication process requiring the human touch, such as the production of the exhaust system,' said Mazzocco.

Every part is barcoded and given a 'life', enabling Renault to track how many kilometres a part has travelled so that engineers can precisely determine when it has to be replaced.

All these processes generate an enormous amount of data, with an increasingly large volume of information streamed back and forth across the company's network, adding to the pressure on Hackland to ensure that nothing goes wrong.

'We have 120 Unix-based workstations and about 400 PCs and laptops, which are all connected to a gigabit Ethernet network. Even the cars are part of the network. As soon as one comes back to the factory, we connect an "umbilical cord" to it, which links it to the rest of our systems,' he said.

Last year, Hackland spent £500,000 on a 6Tb storage system from Network Appliance to help cope with the ever-increasing amount of information generated and speed up the design process (Computing, March 13, 2003).

The incredible volume of data is helping Renault move its way up the grand prix leader board, and also gives an insight into just how much today's manufacturing is being changed by IT.

Print me a car

One of the most fascinating technologies at the Renault F1 Team's factory is situated in its advanced digital manufacturing (ADM) centre, home of the wind tunnel and aerodynamics specialists.

In a room directly above the tunnel, Renault uses four three-dimensional printers from 3D Technologies, which are able to receive CAD models electronically from the design team and 'print' parts in as little as four hours.

Each of the £650,000 machines allows the company to create precise three-dimensional models, using a laser to 'cure' liquid resin into a hardened resin product.

The limitation of the machines right now is not so much their cost, but the limited range of materials that can be used.

'In a few years time you'll be able to build a large part of the car in these printers. The material we're most interested in is aluminium, which is not there yet. If they do, it'll change everything,' said a machinist in the ADM centre.

'It's not inconceivable in the future that we'd put a machine in the back of a truck at the race with an internet connection and just print out the part that we need.'

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!