NVIDIA RTX is spinning new cycles for designs. Trek Bicycle is utilizing GPUs to carry design ideas to life.

The Wisconsin-based firm, one of many largest bicycle producers on the planet, goals to create bikes with the highest-quality craftsmanship. With its new companion Lidl, a global retailer chain, Trek Bicycle additionally owns a biking crew, now referred to as Lidl-Trek. The crew is competing within the annual Tour de France stage race on Trek Bicycle’s flagship lineup, which incorporates the Emonda, Madone and Velocity Idea. Most of the crew’s equipment and gear, such because the wheels and street race helmets, have been additionally designed at Trek.

Bicycle design entails advanced physics — and a key problem is balancing aerodynamic effectivity with consolation and journey high quality. To handle this, the crew at Trek is utilizing NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs to run high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, setting new benchmarks for aerodynamics in a bicycle that’s additionally comfy to journey and handles easily.

The designers and engineers are additional enhancing their workflows utilizing NVIDIA RTX expertise in Dell Precision workstations, together with the NVIDIA RTX A5500 GPU, in addition to a Dell Precision 7920 operating twin RTX A6000 GPUs.

Visualizing Bicycle Designs in Actual Time

To kick off the product design course of, the crew begins with person analysis to generate early design ideas and develop a variety of concepts. Then, they construct prototypes and iterate the design as wanted.

To enhance efficiency, the bikes have to really feel a sure manner, whether or not riders are taking it on the street or the path. So Trek spends quite a lot of time with athletes to determine the place to make crucial modifications, together with tweaks to geometry and the pliability of the body and taking the sting off of bumps.

The designers use graphics-intensive purposes instruments for his or her computer-aided design workflows, together with Adobe Substance 3D, Cinema 4D, KeyShot, Redshift and SOLIDWORKS. For CFD simulations, the Trek Efficiency Analysis crew makes use of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ from Siemens Digital Industries Software program to benefit from the GPU processing capabilities.

NVIDIA RTX GPUs supplied Trek with an enormous leap ahead for design and engineering. The visualization crew can simply faucet into RTX expertise to iterate faster and present extra choices in designs. They will additionally use Cinema 4D and Redshift with RTX to provide high-quality renderings and even to visualise totally different designs in close to actual time.

Michael Hammond, the lead for digital visible communications at Trek Bicycle, explains the significance of getting time for iterations. “The quicker we will render a picture or animation, the quicker we will enhance it,” he stated. “However on the identical time, we don’t wish to lose particulars or spend time recreating fashions.”

With the assistance of the RTX A5500, Trek’s digital visible crew can push previous artistic limits and attain the ultimate design a lot quicker. “On common, the RTX GPU performs 12x quicker than our community rendering, which is on CPU cores,” stated Hammond. “For a render that takes about two hours to finish on our community, it solely takes round 10-12 minutes on the RTX A5500 — meaning I can do 12x the iterations, which results in higher high quality rendering and animation in much less time.”

Accelerating CFD Simulations

Over the previous decade, adoption of CFD has grown as a crucial instrument for engineers and gear designers as a result of it permits them to achieve higher insights into the habits of their designs. However CFD is greater than an evaluation instrument — it’s used to make enhancements with out having to resort to time-consuming and costly bodily testing for each design. This is the reason Trek has built-in CFD into its product growth workflows.

The aerodynamics crew at Trek depends on Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to optimize the efficiency of every bike. To supply a snug journey and easy dealing with whereas attaining the very best aerodynamic efficiency, the Trek engineers designed the most recent technology Madone to make use of IsoFlow, a novel function designed to extend rider consolation whereas decreasing drag.

The Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulations profit from the pace of accelerated GPU computing,  and it enabled the engineers to chop down simulation runtimes by 85 days, as they may run CFD simulations 4-5x quicker on NVIDIA A100 GPUs in comparison with their 128-core CPU-based HPC server.

The crew can even analyze extra advanced physics in CFD to higher perceive how the air is transferring in real-world unsteady circumstances.

“Now that we will run greater constancy and extra correct simulations and nonetheless meet deadlines, we’re in a position to scale back wind tunnel testing time for important price financial savings,” stated John Davis, the aerodynamics lead at Trek Bicycle. “Inside the first two months of operating CFD on our GPUs, we have been in a position to cancel a deliberate wind tunnel check as a result of elevated confidence we had in simulation outcomes.”

Study extra about Trek Bicycle and GPU-accelerated Simcenter STAR-CCM+.

And be part of us at SIGGRAPH, which runs from Aug. 6-10, to see the most recent applied sciences shaping the way forward for design and simulation.