Red Bull Ford Powertrains selects TURBOdesign for Turbocharger Development

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Established in 2021, Red Bull Ford Powertrains (RBFPT) is charged with the creation of F1 power units for Oracle Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Alpha Tauri for 2026 season onwards, and as development of the new powerplant accelerates, the company has chosen ADT’s TURBOdesign Suite software package for the design and optimization of Turbochargers.


Oracle Red Bull Racing and Red Bull Ford Powertrains needs to develop the fastest cars in the world, from car aerodynamics, chassis, engine and of course the turbocharger. These key components need to be developed in a tight interactive process to maximize performances.


Red Bull Ford Powertrains is working on developing a power unit which will comply with 2026 regulations in partnership with Ford as Red Bull Ford Powertrains in a new Power Unit factory at the Red Bull Technology Campus in Milton Keynes.
Speaking about Red Bull Powertrains, CEO Christian Horner, said: “This represents a significant step for Red Bull in its Formula One journey. We now begin the work of bringing the power unit division in-house and integrating the new facilities and personnel into our Technology Campus.”

 

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“This represents a significant step for Red Bull in its Formula One journey. We now begin the work of bringing the power unit division in-house and integrating the new facilities and personnel into our Technology Campus.”

 

Christian Horner (CEO)
Red Bull Ford Powertrains

RBFPT is a new entity for the F1 Power Unit development and therefore looked at TURBOdesign’s great capability in aerodynamic design for the turbocharger optimization to swiftly and successfully launch the turbocharger development project.
TURBOdesign is the reference tool for high performance turbocharger design and optimization, the unique 3D Inverse Design is well versed to create geometries for all of the compressor and turbine components that are optimized for user specified flow conditions and performance requirements. The nature of the aerodynamic design is that the flow is three-dimensional in nature and therefore only fully 3D design tools can accomplish the best performances in short development times.

 

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RBFPT engineers received support from ADT’s design team to develop and implement a number of integrated workflows linking ADT’s TURBOdesign with RBFPT’s simulation environment.


ADT’s engineering team also provided RBFPT with guidance and support on the best practices for development of high-performance turbochargers, its application to race vehicles and also provided three days of on-site training to make sure all users were up to speed.


In total it took around two weeks to complete the integration work and being productive with the tools and workflows.

“Developing a new power unit, including turbocharger from initial conception opens a world of possibilities and the ability to explore as many options as quickly as possible makes the difference to be on the first row. TURBOdesign allows our engineering team to streamline development of high-performance turbochargers from the initial conception and engine matching, to the detailed and optimised 3D components. TURBOdesign’s unique 3D inverse design has been identified as the most rapid and efficient way to quickly generate high performance wheels answering the main aerodynamic and mechanical requirements.”

 

Ben Hodgkinson, Technical Director at Red Bull Ford Powertrains

TURBOdesign offers numerous advantages in turbomachinery developments, two of the most important are the ability to quickly generate geometries that achieve the required performances with minimal CFD iterations, even for completely new turbocharger conditions and architectures. In addition, a unique aspect of 3D Inverse Design is that the blade loading has higher affinity to aerodynamic performances, therefore it is possible to create very accurate surrogate models which require up to two orders of magnitude less CFD runtime than conventional methods.

 

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All images used in this case study are samples and they are not the actual design of the turbine used in the Power Unit.

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