A giant among the French cycling teams, Equipe Cycliste Groupama-FDJ was founded in 1997 by retired cyclists Marc and Yvon Madiot and has won over 500 races, including 38 Grand Tour stages.
The team credits its success to its patriotism, committing ‘heart and soul’ to winning the French Champion jersey each year. But this loyalty is not enough alone for success, and Groupama-FDJ’s commitment to performance and engineering breakthroughs is a large reason for its winning prowess.
In the Besançon Performance Centre, Groupama FDJ’s engineers and designers continuously develop its bicycles and other equipment, including helmets, to keep its athletes at the forefront of new technological advancements while also remaining safe and compliant with cycling rules.
Since 2021, its performance and innovation team has been using Ansys Fluent fluid simulation software to run CFD simulations, testing aerodynamics in wind tunnels.
“The wind on the flat is approximately 90 per cent of the total resistance,” says head of performance and innovation Frederic Grappe. “The rider takes 70 per cent of the drag, and the bike is close to 30 per cent. That’s why it’s important to consider the two parts: the rider and his positions – and also materials like his helmet.”
The team has built virtual wind tunnels using Ansys Fluent, which provide the team with more information than real wind tunnels, including surface pressure and flow direction. They also created a manikin of cyclist Stefan Küng to act in the simulation, making the results as accurate as possible.
“When you are in a wind tunnel test,” says Grappe, “you only have the total drag of the system, but you don’t know the effect of the air on the system. Using Fluent software, you can have a good understanding of the effect of the airflow of the frame on the riders.” Groupama-FDJ’s team also uses Ansys Discovery 3D product simulation software to provide quick analyses of airflow around the athlete early in the design process, allowing them to make an initial plan in minutes before beginning the design process.
Once a quick plan has been drawn up, Ansys Fluent is used for in-depth analysis with more information.
Groupama-FDJ also uses the Ansys Gateway cloud engineering solution, supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS). As the design demands grew more complex, it could not keep up with the complexity of the simulations, with each one taking 24 hours of work to complete. The design team took the ADDL technical support lessons and tutorials available in the Ansys Learning Hub to learn how to use the new software.
Ansys Gateway made the team’s calculation time 17 times faster, reducing the traditional 24 hour process to one or two hours, giving the design team extra space to develop prototypes and give focus to new concepts.
R&D engineer Victor Simonin was initially doubtful that the cloud system would be implemented successfully. “I was totally lost, and I said that it’ll be impossible or too complicated to implement that. But Ansys and AWS worked with us to find a solution that was easy to implement,” he says.
Using Ansys’s software, Groupama-FDJ continues to rise through the world rankings, flying the flag for French cycling.
