The Dark Side of Aerodynamics

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.

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