In the foyer area (where tea and coffee and the occasional cheeky pastry was always on offer), there were some interactive demonstrations. For instance, one of the battles for aerodynamicists is to justify the new wing or design they have to the designers. When building a car, whatever spec it is, you have many departments all pushing in different directions.
To name a few you have the aero guys who want to make the most efficient aero package, you have the Mass planning guys who want to add the least weight possible, and you have the designers who want the car to be aesthetically pleasing. So whenever a new design is made for whatever reason it has to be justified and backed up with facts and figures. Therefore, justifying the predicted airflow is something aerodynamicists have to do, which is particularly hard when you can't see it. This can be done with flowviz in Wind tunnels, however as we know from motorsport, this is highly expensive.
So what this CFD company had was visual effects on the CFD models where the airflow can be represented in many different ways and they also used 3D glasses - similar to current cinemas, which really helps the visualisation for the user. Now this may seem a bit flashy - and it is - however, when I was working at Nissan in aerodynamics this was part of my job - to visually represent the airflow using CFD and post processing software to explain to the designers why a certain spoiler or winglet was needed - and processes like this are becoming crucial to effectively communicate technical information. 'A picture paints a thousand words'.
There was also quite a bit of fun as well. The conference was set in a beautiful hotel with Bentleys on display. On the evening of the 1st day, there was a lovely 3 course dinner in a beautiful setting - another chance to connect with attendees in a more relaxed environment. On the evening of the 2nd day there was a trip to a Bentley showroom which was nearby - I didn't go to this but from the photos it looked great.
Overall, I learnt much more than expected and I think this conference gave the perfect balance of not being too technical and tedious to make it daunting, yet giving enough insight to make it interesting. They were 2 long days, but due to the variety of speakers and activities it really flew by. I would recommend this to anyone already in the aerodynamics field or studying to be in that field or even with a mild interest in aerodynamics.
As mentioned above, this conference offered a fantastic level of current and interesting technical information across a wide range of industries which you will likely read about in textbooks in five years’ time. It is very rare to gain such valuable information and opinions on some of today's most important topics from some of the world's greatest aerodynamicists of the automotive/motorsport industry.