Overview
As Aerodynamics Engineer on the Stanford Solar Car Project, I work on reducing the drag and improving the crosswind handling of the team’s American Solar Challenge race car. The core of my contribution is a cloud CFD automation pipeline that makes it fast and repeatable to evaluate aerodynamic geometry changes — replacing one-off manual solver runs with a standardized, logged workflow.
Luminary Cloud CFD Pipeline
I built and deployed a web application on Railway that accepts a STEP file upload and automatically runs a standardized CFD analysis on Luminary Cloud. Results — drag coefficient, lift, pressure distributions — are automatically logged to Google Sheets via the Google Cloud APIs, creating a persistent record of every run for easy comparison across design iterations.
This pipeline cuts the time from geometry change to results from hours of manual setup to a single file upload, and makes it accessible to the whole team without requiring individual CFD software licenses.
GitHub: SolarCarLuminaryAutoCFD
Retractable Twin-Skin Sail Concept
In parallel, I modeled and prototyped a retractable twin-skin sail concept for the car’s dorsal surface. The sail deploys a cambered airfoil profile when crosswinds are favorable, generating a side-force component that partially offsets the power cost of steering correction — reducing net crosswind power consumption. The sail retracts flush when not beneficial (e.g., headwind or tailwind conditions), preserving the car’s baseline drag polar.
The concept involved:
- Parametric aerosurface geometry in CAD
- CFD evaluation of sail camber and angle-of-attack sweep across crosswind angles
- Active control architecture for deploy/retract and trim angle based on real-time wind sensor input