It was not until the late 60's that
aerodynamics really began to play a role in the automotive world. Before this, some assumptions were made and on rare occasions effort was put into reducing
drag. This is not surprising, as the matter is hard to see.
But this all changed as Chaparral came to the idea of exploiting an inverse airfoil (wing) of a plane to create negative lift (better known as downforce in the racing world), for his Le Mans car. This new form of using the air in his advantage gave a lot of extra performance and stability.
But this all changed as Chaparral came to the idea of exploiting an inverse airfoil (wing) of a plane to create negative lift (better known as downforce in the racing world), for his Le Mans car. This new form of using the air in his advantage gave a lot of extra performance and stability.
Through the aerodynamic pressure working
downwards on the vehicle it gives extra grip and thereby makes it possible to
go faster through corners, something the aeronautical world had exploited long
before this to lift airplanes.
The effect of downforce in some classes of
motor sport changed them more than ever. On the other hand the wings brought a
great deal of extra drag along with them, so more
horse power is needed in order to reach high speeds. More horse power means more
fuel consumption. The fine line between reducing drag and finding more
downforce is what makes the difference between Formula 1 teams nowadays, the
pinnacle of motor sport. In other words it’s a fine line between going faster
through corners and going faster on the straights.
All of this is obviously not applicable for the common road cars if we
speak in terms of speed. But jet again we can learn a lot from the aeronautical
world, where they are pushing the boundaries more than ever, like they used to
do in the Formula 1, and where InMotion wants to pick up the pace again.
Why should we make this trade-off between fast
cornering and going faster on straights if we could morph the aerodynamic
package to deliver the right conditions at the right time and thereby making a
far more efficient car. Furthermore why shouldn't we use this research for
exploiting the aerodynamic forces to deliver more and direct safety to
passenger cars and make them more efficient to reduce our energy consumption.
InMotion wants to give back the times where the
use of research done in motor sport is also used as cutting edge technologies
for passenger cars. And from the aerodynamically point of view we want to do
this in a smart way, with intelligent control systems that can adjust the angle
of attack from an airfoil in milliseconds and thereby adjust to the needs form
the position on the track.
In the future we also want to exploit other
reaching areas like the possibilities of fully morphing panels and wings with
the use of new materials, better controlling the boundary layers, and using
more advanced and powerful computational fluid dynamics. In this last part
there is yet a lot to gain as there is great research being done on new methods
of applying the Navier-Stokes equations, and thereby making the computational
times less, and the need for wind tunnel tests.
All in all aerodynamics is a huge field of research where
lots of new technologies are yet to be discovered and large gains are still to
be found.
Hope this blog has inspired you all and
illuminated the dark side of aerodynamics a bit more although it will always be
hard to see.
For more information about InMotion's research, visit http://inmotion.tue.nl
