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 this 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 known 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. Lots of the crew’s equipment and gear, such because the wheels and highway 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 deal with 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 working twin RTX A6000 GPUs.

Visualizing Bicycle Designs in Actual Time

To kick off the product design course of, the crew begins with consumer 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 method, whether or not riders are taking it on the highway or the path. So Trek spends plenty of time with athletes to determine the place to make essential modifications, together with tweaks to geometry and the pliability of the body and taking the sting off of bumps.

The designers use graphics-intensive functions 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 reap the benefits of the GPU processing capabilities.

NVIDIA RTX GPUs offered Trek with a large 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’ll additionally use Cinema 4D and Redshift with RTX to provide high-quality renderings and even to visualise completely 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 are able to render a picture or animation, the quicker we are able to enhance it,” he mentioned. “However on the identical time, we don’t need to lose particulars or spend time recreating fashions.”

With the assistance of the RTX A5500, Trek’s digital visible crew can push previous inventive 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,” mentioned 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 ends up 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 essential 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. Because of this 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 clean dealing with whereas attaining the most effective aerodynamic efficiency, the Trek engineers designed the most recent technology Madone to make use of IsoFlow, a singular characteristic designed to extend rider consolation whereas lowering drag.

The Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulations profit from the velocity 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 raised perceive how the air is shifting in real-world unsteady circumstances.

“Now that we are able to run larger constancy and extra correct simulations and nonetheless meet deadlines, we’re capable of scale back wind tunnel testing time for important value financial savings,” mentioned John Davis, the aerodynamics lead at Trek Bicycle. “Inside the first two months of working CFD on our GPUs, we have been capable of cancel a deliberate wind tunnel take a look at because of the elevated confidence we had in simulation outcomes.”

Be taught 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.