From Reus to PRACE

MY ORIGINS

My name is Benet Eiximeno Franch and I come from a beautiful city located in Catalunya called Reus. You may not have heard about it but you might be familiar with some of the illustrious people who were borned there: Antoni Gaudí (the architect of La Sagrada Família), el General Prim (former Spain Prime Minister) or Sergi Roberto (footballer of FC Barcelona). If you ever have the chance, I do encourage you to visit it, you will be able to see some of the most important Art Noveau buildings in Spain, enjoy the tastiest vermouth and watch a great match of roller hockey.

MY PASSION

I have always been a passionate of racing cars and cycling, and since I was a child, my life has turned around both of them. My ambition is to become a Formula 1 aerodynamicist and that is the reason why I studied aerospace engineering in Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (near Barcelona). Nowadays I am doing the master’s degree in aeronautical and aerospace engineering in that same university while collaborating with a computational aerodynamics research group there.

Moreover, due to my passion for racing cars, I work in Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya as a technical scrutineer. My role there is ensuring that all cars are legal and safe to race and to do that I am working in the pre-race checks, then I stay in the garage of the teams to check their procedures (and depending on the race I also go to the starting grid) and finally we verify that the top cars were fully legal. It is absolutely magic to leave my passion from such a close point of view, specially during the Spanish Formula 1 Grand Prix.

Besides that, during the last years I have also been highly involved in EUROAVIA the European association of aerospace engineering students, right now I am the vice-president of its International Board. This experience has allowed me to get to know people from all around Europe!

MY PROJECT IN PRACE

And after having introduced myself, I would just like to thank PRACE for giving me the chance of being part of this program which I am so excited to start these days! I will be in one of the projects mentored by the University of Luxembourg, precisely about the CFD resolution of the Drivaer. As I have been mentioning through this post, I love both aerodynamics and cars, so this will be a brilliant opportunity to learn about both.

From this project I do expect to extract a huge amount of knowledge about computational aerodynamics (numerical methods, turbulence models, meshing sizes…) and also about the aerodynamic coherent structures around a car. Understanding the drag generation mechanisms is going to be key in order to reduce the fuel consumption and help the industry to design greener cars.

Besides all the knowledge I will get, I am extremely excited to start a research on that topic as the aerodynamic improvements on cars will for sure have an impact on the mobility of the future.

I just can not wait to put the hands on work and continue updating you with the first results of the project!!