Good cars are the secrets of exploring the wind tunnel

F1 Red Bull Racing Chief Designer Rob Marshal once said that the design of the car has four elements, namely: aerodynamic efficiency, mechanical efficiency, engine and racer, if a team has excellent aerodynamic efficiency and four elements of the other three Two of them, then they have achieved a good combination, of course, all four elements will have that is unbeatable. Although this phrase is not necessarily the truth in F1 today, it can be seen that aerodynamic efficiency is in the eyes of a chief designer.


In fact, it is equally important in the field of civil vehicles, but it has different aerodynamic designs based on different functions and roles. Designing a fast, safe and fuel-efficient vehicle to deal with air is one of the most important technologies that engineers must research.

● The importance of automotive aerodynamics

In addition to being driven from the road surface, the car is driven by various forces acting on it by the surrounding air. In the past 100 years, in order to understand their characteristics and their impact on automobiles, the research and exploration of automotive aerodynamics has not stopped.

Aerodynamics is a characteristic that cannot be ignored in a car. It directly affects the dynamics of the car, fuel economy, handling stability and comfort. Because the aerodynamic force is dominant in all aspects of high-speed running cars, good aerodynamic characteristics are the preconditions for high-speed and safe driving of automobiles. When a car runs at a low speed, the aerodynamic torque exerted on the car has a small impact on the car's performance. .

The six forces acting on the vehicle include: aerodynamic drag, aerodynamic lift, pneumatic lateral force, aerodynamic trim moment, aerodynamic yaw moment and aerodynamic roll moment; these forces are collectively referred to as six-component forces acting at high speeds. The car will have a magical effect.

Aerodynamic drag includes pressure differential resistance, frictional resistance, induced resistance, and inflow resistance. In the high-speed driving of a car, it will be affected by aerodynamic drag, in which the aerodynamic resistance overcomes a considerable part of the work done by the engine, and the higher the speed, the greater the power consumed by the aerodynamic drag, and the fuel used to overcome the aerodynamic drag. The greater the consumption. Therefore, many vehicles rely on lower aerodynamic drag to reduce fuel consumption at high speeds. This is not a problem.

There are still a few remaining forces I will not go into details one by one, in short, pneumatic power and aerodynamic torque have a great impact on all aspects of driving, and interested friends can learn about the car aerodynamic related articles.

Automotive aerodynamic research experiments can not be separated from the test equipment, wind tunnel is naturally essential. Many car companies in the world have not hesitated to spend huge sums of money to build expensive wind tunnel laboratories, and have continuously upgraded and built new ones. The automotive wind tunnel experiment technology is also being perfected step by step.

In the process of modern car design and development, CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) is already indispensable. He is complementary to the wind tunnel. CFD is a fluid-powered calculation and analysis method that uses computer-based complex and complex calculations to obtain vehicle airflow data and virtual visualizations, so engineers can see flow, pressure, velocity, and gas flow through the model surface. 3D animation.

The value of CFD and the CAD model can be analyzed in the early stage of development. The best choice is to save time and cost. The model analyzed by CFD calculation still needs to be proved and fine tuned by the wind tunnel. So CFD It needs to be used in conjunction with a wind tunnel to efficiently and accurately test and analyze vehicles and components.

2 Brief introduction to the wind tunnel

● What is the wind tunnel?

Because wind tunnels can simulate the atmosphere, wind tunnels are one of the vehicles that rely mainly on aerodynamics in the early stages of vehicle design and development.

The automotive wind tunnel mainly measures aerodynamic characteristics, pressure distribution through the car surface, flow field characteristics of various parts of the car, intake and exhaust characteristics of the cooling airflow of the engine, and some situations such as ventilation and noise in the cabin.

In order to obtain stable and consistent airflow, the air flow from the fan will pass through a series of structures set in the wind tunnel, such as turning vanes, rectifying screens, etc.; the airflow in the test section of the wind tunnel can simulate the state of large airflow field. What specific rectification structures are described later in this article.

Most of the wind tunnels now have movable floors (there were many old wind tunnels that were not available decades ago). In the wind tunnel laboratory, the tested cars were stationary, in order to truly simulate the road surface. In the driving situation, the road needs to be moved.

● How is the wind tunnel formed?

The automotive wind tunnel relies on a series of processes to achieve and optimize the continuity of the air in the wind tunnel. Producing a horizontally stable and consistent air flow plays an important role in obtaining accurate, reliable and reproducible results.

● Wind tunnel construction is the most basic setting, and of course there are instruments for measuring the results of wind tunnel experiments.

Acoustic measurement experiments are also indispensable in pneumatic-acoustic wind tunnels, and reducing wind noise is also a very important task. During the test, the acoustic characteristics of the artificial head acoustic measuring device and the microphone array measuring car are mainly used, and the aerodynamic noise inside and outside the vehicle is measured and analyzed under a certain wind speed.

● Editing summary:

The influence of aerodynamics on the vehicle makes the wind tunnel an indispensable vehicle builder. No, it is the wind tunnel that has become an indispensable tool to build a car. Many people will care about the engine, chassis, appearance, configuration, etc., but there are few people who care about the aerodynamics of a car. This is not something far away from us. It is with us. Life in the car is closely related.

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