Do you guys have any info on fender louvers? You see them on most, if not all enclosed wheel racecars, but what is the benefit of going with a top mount louver (seen on some ALMS cars) versus one on the side (DTM)?

I also found this: "Race Car Aerodynamics: Designing for Speed (Engineering and Performance)" by Joseph Katz

l8r)

 

Excellent book, I've got it in my living room. I've read it about 50 times and looked at it probably 50 more.

 

http://www.mulsannescorner.com/chaparral2j.html

This is the original sucker car. Snomobile engine powering two big fans in back that sucked the air out from under the car.

EVOlutionary

 

that is damn cool

 

I believe some of the A-Mod cars in autocross use this same strategy, except on a smaller scale. I think they use a leaf-blower motor on those.

EVOlutionary

 

wonder when they'll ban that...

 

Don't know. Probably won't ban it. A-Mod is pretty much all-out do whatever you want to go faster. They are open-wheel formula cars with giant multi-later wings front and rear. Some have side skirts that scrape the ground to keep all air out from under the car.

 

I have that book. Very cool.


- Andrew

 

to bring this back up i was watching grand prix at indy and they note that the wings now have a stiff arch that keeps them seperated. somehow before the wings were flexible and at high speeds they would deform in some advantageous way. the details i'm just not sure of still.

 

^That's the device the FIA have told all the teams to fit in an effort to keep the separation constant. The somehow failed to say that the top/bottom of the arches cannot be pivot joint and that the aero surfaces cannot twist under load.

Basically a number of teams, Renault I believe is one, never really had their top element deflect vertically to meet the bottom as much as have it twist to meet the bottom...

I spoke to a prof. at an aero department and he rekons the wing deformation is nothing new. Basically if you have two elements that at some point come together to form one then you effectively have two wings. If you're clever enough then you might be able to make some use out of it. He doesn't quite know either and is quite worried about the response in the in-between stages.

As far as I am concerned, (mech. eng - hated aero at uni) wouldn't that mean you need oodles of computing time to work out what happens at the various stage of the deflection and to design in something that deflects form one shape to another really predictably - while using a non-isotropic material? Now that's a job I don't want.

 

or you could just send it out with a driver and hide the results. which is what likely happened.

 

yeah, I think when McLaren tried it with the whole rear wing assembly tilting back at high speed, Kimi wasn't too pleased when his came off at around 200mph!

anyway, I'm can't wait to hear the verdict on the latest charade with the FIA claiming that a 'mass damper' {a bit of steel/tungsten on a spring inside the car} is actually an aerodynamic device....

 

Active Aero honda project that could be done with an Evo as well

http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/ab_par...918834,00.html

 

it may be non-isotropic but it can still be modeled using a computational fluid dynamics. NASA tested and aero elastic wing on an F/A-18 that was made to deflect under from moments generated bythe aileron. They ended up showing they could close to the same roll rates out of the aero elastic wing as they could with the conventional wing.

 

Well, it's not impossible, but hey we're talking NASA here! They probably have slightly more powerful computers than most of us. Just a guess.
Anyway, it's one thing to model and quite another to design.
Once they've done all that, they've got to make it then test it as well. I guess that's where all the millions of dollars is going.