Formula One (F1) Teams Race on CATIA and ENOVIA Product Lifecycle Management Solutions
It’s no secret that the greatest in cutting-edge race vehicles on the Formula One (F1) grid today were created utilizing CATIA 3D design and ENOVIA PLM technologies.
The top computer-aided design, manufacturing, and engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) software in the world is CATIA. In order to foster a transparent, knowledge-based ecosystem that connects businesses, their clients, and their suppliers, ENOVIA Solutions offers collaborative product lifecycle management capabilities.
What is CATIA?
The best solution in the world for product design and user experience is CATIA. Leading companies across a variety of industries utilize it not only to create the goods we see and use every day, but also the leading luxury products and technologies.
Design in the age of experience is made possible by CATIA’s special ability to represent any product in the context of its actual behaviour. The connected environment can be defined, imagined, and shaped by systems architects, engineers, designers, construction specialists, and all other stakeholders.
What is ENOVIA?
Teams from throughout the value network can securely interact and innovate with one another thanks to ENOVIA, which helps turn market possibilities into competitive advantages.
By structured collaboration and governance, ENOVIA enables everyone in the value network to exchange knowledge, increase productivity, enhance quality, and cut costs. Not only this, but ENOVIA drives the ability to gain confidence in achieving development and cost targets, view real-time data from across the enterprise in a single, contextual dashboard and leverage data science to make informed planning decisions.
How are F1 teams driving success with CATIA and ENOVIA?
Everything related to F1 racing must move rapidly since it is a sport in which split-second timing separates the best from the rest.
Vehicle construction companies and engine producers use CATIA to achieve considerable time savings and quality gains across the board, from part design and simulation to production and final assembly.
With the aid of ENOVIA, teams can manage every aspect of their product life cycle electronically, including information on geometry, bills of materials, production schedules, mass/inertia calculations, parts inventory, and car configurations that include information on drivers, circuits, weather, and race conditions.
By working together, CATIA and ENOVIA lessen the need for physical prototypes, enabling more design iterations, and ultimately empower engineers to create the part correctly the first time.
When teams introduce new or modified parts for races that take place every two weeks, such time-saving procedures allow for continual performance development throughout the racing season.
Throughout the racing season, each car’s configuration changes dramatically, with 70% of its components having new designs to enhance performance. Teams are able to exploit knowledge of the car configuration and track data to optimize the design of the complete car. Using ENOVIA, teams can manage the configuration of each car throughout its lifecycle and make this data available to everyone in the team – wherever they are located.
Using CATIA and ENOVIA, teams gain significant economies of time and manpower – with the solutions being fully integrated, data moves seamlessly among them. This makes things like installation and training easier. Because ENOVIA Portal enables teams to exchange visual product information in real time throughout the entire business, enabling easy access to non-design areas of the business, such as purchasing, it also aids in the reduction of errors across the entire organisation.
The Human Factor
At each racecar’s core, is the cockpit. It’s a compact space that needs to be safe and practical for the driver. F1 designers can reduce the physiological demands placed on drivers by heat, noise, vibration, and the safety restrictions of the car by using the Catia V5 Human Modeling module.
Engineers may also mimic driver behaviour and assess important factors including reach, visibility, comfort, posture, biomechanics, strength, and anthropometrics using Catia V5 Human Modeling ergonomics tools. Using this data, F1 teams can choose the best cockpit layout for the driver while also maintaining the car’s overall aerodynamics.
Shaving off the seconds
As mentioned, F1 racing is a sport of milliseconds. The governing body of Formula One, the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile), lays forth a number of exact technical specifications that each F1 team must adhere to when developing their vehicle. Under the same set of rules, a team’s improvements in performance typically results from small improvements to the car’s aerodynamics, engine, power train, chassis, and suspension. CATIA and ENOVIA offer tried-and-true approaches for every F1 area, allowing engineers to optimise the performance of every component of the race car to allow them to speed across the finish line that millisecond quicker than the competition.
Find out more
- Learn about the capabilities of CATIA and it’s broad range of integrated solutions, and how these can benefit your business. Find out more.
- ENOVIA is powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform – find out more about how this extensive portfolio, designed to enable you to streamline your processes. Find out more.
