ARCHER2 Calendar October 2026

Vortices swirling around a Formula 1 front wing

Mr Parv Khurana, Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London

This image shows the instantaneous swirling three-dimensional vortices generated by the Imperial Front Wing (IFW), a benchmark Formula 1 geometry based on the McLaren MP4-17D race car. The Lambda2 isocontours, coloured by streamwise velocity, highlight the complex wake created by the multi-element wing operating in ground effect with a rolling wheel.
The flow field was computed using one of the highest-fidelity aerodynamic simulation approaches available: wall-resolved implicit large-eddy simulations (iLES). The unsteady simulation involved over 260 million unknowns and required more than 6 days of continuous computation on 8,192 CPU cores of ARCHER2. Thanks to recent improvements in the Nektar++ software, such runs now take only a third of the time compared with just a few years ago. This benchmark dataset will support future aerodynamic studies by providing a reference for both wind tunnel measurements and lower-fidelity models.

This image was published on the October page of the ARCHER2 2026 printed calendar.