From Simulation to Reality: The Bloodhound Land Speed Record Car

Over a decade ago I stood on a stage in the Science Museum in London along with Andy Green and Richard Noble to announce that a new British Land Speed Record attempt was on the horizon. We promised that we would be raising the Land Speed Record to 1,000 mph by 2011 – how naïve we were!

In reality, the technical (and financial!) challenges involved in developing a project that would deliver a vehicle as complex as a fighter jet and capable of travelling across the surface of the Earth at Mach 1.3 turned out to be greater than any of us could have imagined. The journey that we’ve been on over the last 10 years has been well documented. My role in it all, as the CFD engineer and part of the aerodynamic design team, has been to ensure that the design evolution of the car was always leading us to a minimum drag and, more importantly, zero/minimum lift solution. The aerodynamic design has been carried out entirely using the Swansea University FLITE3D Computational Fluid Dynamics software suite