Scanning Bluebird - the Fastest Electric Vehicle

2: Scanning the Fastest Electric Vehicle
Wednesday 31st August 2011

It isn’t actually that easy to scan a large vehicle for CFD(*). A CMM is out of the question. Handheld or arm-based lasers are impractical. Long-range laser scanners or laser radar could certainly gather data, but not to the required accuracy. The Quartz 800DBE/4S scanner from Phase Vision was selected. This uses an advanced “structured light” technique, allowing very fast, accurate measurements at high speed. While a range of scanner resolutions is available, this variant captures 4M micron-accurate measurements across a large measurement volume in a few seconds – deemed to be ample accuracy on the vehicle. The scanner used was configured with a measurement volume of approximately 1m3. The output of the scanner was then 60 or 70 individual scans, each containing up to 4M measurement points. These were captured over a couple of hours, in the team’s workshop.

The scans were then merged together to form a single model of the vehicle. This ultimately contained quarter of a billion individual measurements – an incredibly detailed model of the vehicle, acquired in a very reasonable timeframe. This type of inspection is significantly different to the majority of production line applications, where a rapid scan is taken at the line’s cycle time – often around a minute. Many production line applications do not require a complete model – just requiring a few critical measurements. However in this case, a full model of the electric vehicle was required for CFD purposes – making it much more akin to a reverse engineering project.

(*) Bluebird actually isn’t that large – it stands knee-high, and is only 1.2m wide. But it is nearly 7 metres long. Achieving accurate measurement for CFD over that sort of distance is a challenge, and one which Phase Vision was glad to help with.

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