New interactive machine learning tool makes car designs more aerodynamic - ScienceBlog.com

When engineers or designers want to test the aerodynamic properties of the newly designed shape of a car, airplane, or other object, they would normally model the flow of air around the object by having a computer solve a complex set of equations–a procedure that usually takes hours or even an entire day. Nobuyuki Umetani from Autodesk research (now at the University of Tokyo) and Bernd Bickel from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) have now significantly sped up this process, making streamlines and parameters available in real-time. Their method, which is the first to use machine learning to model flow around continuously editable 3D objects, will be presented at this year's prestigious SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, where IST Austria researchers are involved in a total of five presentations. Machine learning can make extremely time-consuming methods a lot faster. Before, the computation of the aerodynamic properties of cars usually took a day.