Industrial Application of the Meshless Morpher RBF Morph to a Motorbike Windshield Optimisation M.E. Biancolini *, C. Biancolini, E. Costa, D. Gattamelata, P.P. Valentini University of Rome Tor Vergata, Mechanical Engineering Department, Via Politecnico 1, 00133 Roma, Italy. *corresponding author biancolini@ing.uniroma2.it ABSTRACT In this paper the aerodynamic optimisation of a motorbike windshield is presented. This challenging optimisation task was made possible tanks to Fluent and the embedded morpher tool RBF Morph, capable to modify the baseline mesh accounting for set-up and for shape changes. The approach is based on a suite of UDF functions that allow to prescribe surface modifications, to smooth the volume mesh accordingly and to update the fluid solution. The morpher is based on a meshless approach (i.e. is defined using only a set of points and produces a deformation field), can be used both in serial and parallel sessions and allows to manage any possible kind of mesh elements. Morphing set-up is done inside Fluent through a comprehensive and user-friendly GUI which allows to define the problem interacting with Fluent entities; moreover TUI commands are also available to modify the shape by means of simple scripts. 1. INTRODUCTION Shape optimization is a very important topic especially in the problems where the motion of a fluid has an important impact on performances. In fact, a slight shape modification can dramatically affect the behaviour of a component that interacts with the fluid. CFD can give an important aid to drive the design of such critical components but a true parametric CFD solver, suitable for optimization, is still missing on the market, especially when large problems need to be handled. Despite shape parameterization is available in the CAD model, used as starting point for CFD model generation, the complex chain that allows to obtain a reliable CFD grid is very difficult to manage. As such, parametric properties and geometric features of the original CAD model are usually lost in the final mesh. The effects of slight modifications can be addressed acting at final level of the complex aforementioned chain: the CFD mesh. In fact required modifications can be introduced by morphing the surface mesh at the boundary of fluid mesh and propagating such deformations inside the domain by means of a smoother. Original mesh topology is preserved but the final quality of the mesh depends on the action of surface morpher and fluid smoother. In this paper the new morphing product RBF Morph is presented starting from the exposition of the background theory of Radial Basis Functions used for the implementation of the numerical kernel of the software. To better understand how RBF Morph can be used for industrial cases, a practical application is considered in the present study: the optimization of a motorbike windshield. 2. RBF MORPH The new product RBF Morph, an integrated system for morphing and shape optimization tailored for the CFD solver ANSYS Fluent, is herein presented. RBF Morph is fully integrated