5th Automotive CFD Prediction Workshop
October 8th-9th 2026, Dama Technopolo, Bologna, Italy
Announcements
| Jan 01, 2026 | We’re excited to announce that AutoCFD5 will be happening October 8th-9th 2026 co-organised by CINECA and Upstream CFD at Dama Technopolo, near Bologna in Italy. Further details will be made available over the coming weeks. |
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| Mar 31, 2025 | AutoCFD5 will be happening September/October 2026. Further details will be announced shortly. |
| Dec 17, 2024 | The recording from the final virtual meeting of AutoCFD4 is now available to watch. AutoCFD5 is tentatively scheduled for Sept/Oct 2026 and we will begin sending out more information in early 2025! If you have any questions in the meantime please reach out to admin@autocfd.org . |
Aims & Scope
AutoCFD5 will be taking place October 8th-9th 2026 at Dama Technopolo near Bologna, Italy with CINECA and Upstream CFD as local co-organisers. This follows the success of the previous four workshops (Oxford, 2019, Berlin, 2021, Barcelona, 2022 and Belfast, 2024).
The main objective of the 5th Automotive CFD Prediction Workshop will be to continue the community effort to assess the predictive capability of CFD codes for road-cars geometries. Through mandatory geometry, boundary conditions and computational grids the aim is to provide practical modelling guidelines to the automotive community e.g best-practice turbulence modelling, meshing, numerical schemes. In addition we want to bring the automotive CFD community (both academia and industry) together to discuss future directions. The test-cases for AutoCFD5 are the same as AutoCFD4 with the addition of the estate variant of the DrivAer. For the AI/ML portion, the open-source DrivAerML dataset will be standard training dataset to assess model architectures.
Computing the test-cases is not required to attend the workshop but we strongly encourage everyone to consider submitting results.
Technology Focus Groups
Based upon positive feedback from AutoCFD4, this workshop we will continue to use the Technology Focus Group (TFG) model where each particpant is requested to join a TFG which covers 5 core areas. These groups will meet every 4-5 weeks and colloboratively share findings and results as we move towards the workshop. The purpose is to encourage deeper discussions over a longer period, compared to only seeing other results and having a discussion during the 2 days of the workshop. The TFG leaders and contacts details are below. Please reach out to them to be included in the monthly meetings which started during the middle of 2025.
Meshing TFG - Vangelis Skaperdas (Cadence / BETA-CAE Systems)
Noise Factors TFG - Burkhard Hupertz (Ford)
AI/ML TFG - Neil Ashton (NVIDIA) and Astrid Walle (Siemens Energy)
Scale Resolving Simulations (SRS) TFG - Charles Mockett and Marian Fuchs (Upstream CFD)
HPC TFG - Herbert Owen and Oriol Lehmkuhl (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
A description of the scope and goals of each TFG can be found here.
Our data policy can be found here.
Organizers
- Simone Bra (CINECA) - local organiser
- Neil Ashton (NVIDIA)
- Burkhard Hupertz (Ford)
- Gary Page (Loughborough University)
- Charles Mockett (Upstream CFD)
- Astrid Walle (Siemens Energy)
- Vangelis Skaperdas (BETA-CAE Systems)
- Ben Thornber (Queens University Belfast)
- Herbert Owen (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
- Charles Ribes (Stellantis)