We may have once thought that artificial intelligence was something from the far future, from a science fiction movie. However, it has become an extraordinary work tool, even for a team of engineers from the Japanese company Nissan, who from their Yokohama Lab department are exploring how far this technology can go in designing the cars of the future.
This team of Nissan engineers ensures that artificial intelligence offers endless solutions for this field, making it clear that "AI can be applied in various fields, including R&D, vehicle production, and even design." It is precisely in this last area that artificial intelligence can play an important role, especially in terms of aerodynamics.
Nissan has taken years to 'feed' its AI
"Today, aerodynamic performance is evaluated by performing repetitive and complex calculations on powerful computers." These calculations predict performance and show airflow, but "to achieve more accurate results through simulation, a large number of complex calculations are required" and can take hundreds of computers several days to complete. That's far from perfect, with Nissan's Kei Akasaka saying it's "very challenging to respond quickly to sudden requests from designers."
For reasons like these, a team of engineers from a Japanese company has gotten down to work to improve things thanks to artificial intelligence. There has been no shortage of all kinds of setbacks in its implementation because Nissan has spent more than a year generating and feeding data to its AI system. They realized that this work would take much longer, so they decided to base themselves on a model with "paired information, such as fluid dynamics equations and other physical laws, as well as the shape of the car."
Thanks to AI, what used to take days is reduced to minutes
This is nothing more than a minimal description of how complex this technology developed by Nissan is, which has already begun to bear fruit, since thanks to artificial intelligence they have been able to "drastically shorten the duration of the simulations by learning the relationship between the shape of the car and its aerodynamic performance based on a large amount of data.” The guys at Nissan also say that thanks to this technology, they are now able to predict the aerodynamic performance of designs in a matter of a few seconds instead of several days.
But this technology not only saves Nissan a lot of time, it will also allow them to achieve "innovative vehicle body shapes, which strike a better level of balance between design and aerodynamics."
Nissan is not the only brand that has thought about AI
As you can imagine, Nissan is not the only car manufacturer exploring the limits and possibilities of artificial intelligence, since Audi is already using it, initially in the design of the wheels of its future cars. The German company has collaborated with FelGAN to develop this tool that is capable of proposing a large number of wheel designs by entering new data or based on existing designs.
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