Figure 16

Shape optimisation of an external mirror. Based on the drag sensitivities of Figure 15, the TUM morphing routines were employed to conduct a one-shot shape optimisation. Only the mirror and the triangle mounted to the car were subject to deformation. The evolution of drag on the mirrors themselves (orange curve), the remaining car body (blue) and their sum effect on the entire vehicle (yellow) are shown. Due to a missing constraint on the mirror glass area, the optimisation would ultimately generate inapplicably small mirror glasses and was therefore aborted before that happened. A constrained version of this optimisation will be published in [29]. Note how the morphing affected the overall shape of the mirror (e.g. the bulgier upstream shape and the more horizontal upper egde), but was capable of keeping the essential feature lines of the original design. An illustrative movie of the shape evolution during optimisation is provided as Additional file 1.