Red Bull racing team will improve cars with Siemens solutions

2020: Using Siemens Solutions to Improve Cars

The Formula 1 team Red Bull, a partner of Siemens since 2004, will improve cars for the 2022 racing season based on Siemens developments. This became known on January 29, 2021.

To do this, we will use a proven adaptive IT infrastructure based on Teamcenter and NX software solutions included in the Xcelerator portfolio (a comprehensive integrated portfolio of Digital Manufacturing software and management services), the Fibersim composite development tool and the Mendix platform for creating small-code applications. The Siemens digital base will help the team overcome the challenges associated with racing requirements.

Formula 1 is revising its rules to attract participants and ensure the viability of racing. The championship introduces cost restrictions to ensure closer competition between large and small teams, as well as to maintain financial autonomy in this discipline. In the 2022 season, participants will have to comply with the radically revised technical regulations (including regarding aerodynamics): among other things, such a dramatic component of competitions as overtaking will increase. As a result, teams, including Red Bull, have to solve difficult problems - in 2021, participants will use cars originally collected for only partially spent 2020 season, but now they will have to take into account financial restrictions. Siemens, along with Red Bull, accepts this call.

We have a small IT team, so we initially wanted to have a high-quality platform with good technical support, "comments Matt Kadier, CIO at Red Bull. - Based on the practices and experience of Siemens, we have worked out flexible, but at the same time optimized processes and resolved problematic issues. As a result, we have a clear understanding of the development phases. We build on digital models and can always make changes to increase efficiency on the production site and on the route.

According to Chris Richardson, a process engineer for the Red Bull team, the Fibersim solution was a real find for them. The manufacture of carbon elements involves the manual laying of carbon fiber layers, which is a very time consuming process. Fibersim, through automation, reduced the build time of one of the elements by 25%, which is equivalent to 55 operator hours. The assembly of half of the suspension has been reduced to vulcanization by 30% - this is more than six hours per component and almost 24 hours for the entire set of car parts. In addition, laminators can be sure that additional material will not have to be embedded in the molds. This also means that the car will be lighter, and in Formula 1 cars every gram.

We chose Fibersim as the best evaluation solution ON because it is compatible with NX, "comments Chris Richardson. - Open architecture of NX Siemens allowed us to automate geometry preparation before sending to Fibersim. We optimized the whole process, which used to take more than four hours. Now Fibersim users can produce carbon fiber parts up to half a millimeter. The correlation between the finished component and the original drawing is maximum - we have never had such accuracy in production before.

Mendix is another step towards digitalization, "says Dan Watkins, head of department CAD/. PLM- Thanks to Siemens support, we have the capabilities to guarantee flexible access to Mendix-based information as a platform for developing low-code applications running on all types of devices.